Well, today was certainly an interesting one. Hot on the heels of the recent report in the Lancet about how cells derived from embryonic stem cells have safely integrated into the maculae of patients with macular degeneration, I was on BBC Radio Ulster defending the ethics. Quick summary - these cells were injected into the eyes of patients with degenerative disorders of the retina; the cells have integrated, and are apparently functioning well. This is exciting and promising research, for people with visual disorders, and many other degenerative conditions.
I think Embryonic Stem Cell Research (ESCR) is a highly ethical avenue of research, but my opponent thinks otherwise. She is Josephine Quintavalle from a lobby group called "Comment on Reproductive Ethics" (CoRE); they take a fairly hard-line embryo-is-a-full-human-person tack, pretty much in accordance with the official position of the Roman Catholic Church (which I find wholly ridiculous, but I may post on that some other time).We had a very polite discussion, expertly chaired by the indomitable William Crawley, but I'll leave the listener to decide whether I did a good job or not.
In retrospect, I wonder if I should have been a little more aggressive. The arguments against ESCR are pretty weak, and are based around a fundamental misunderstanding (or downgrading) of what it means to be a human person.
Anyway, have a listen - our bit starts at about 33 minutes: http://t.co/V0Rr94dP
Please leave any comments below - I would love to hear 'em.
You certainly did a good job of covering the key points in the end, but you may have benefited by getting her onto the back foot early on - I'm no expert, mind! It needn't be an aggressive tactic as such, but you'd might as well make them respond to you, as you can at least dictate the terms of the discussion to some extent, rather than having to defend your view from the disadvantaged position of having to hack your way through their skewed interpretation of the subject.
ReplyDeleteMentioning at the start that these embryos lack the neural structures to form thoughts or feel pain would force her to justify her position of saying the early embryos are the same thing as a human being. Perhaps asking such people why they draw the line between sperm/ova and embryos would expose just how arbitrary their position is.
You did a great job of managing to remain polite!
Thanks - I did get a slight feeling that I should have opened up with the big guns earlier on, with specific examples that would have rendered her Hungarian comment even more irrelevant than it was already.
DeleteOdd how those who care so much for a zygote care so little for an actual child.
ReplyDeleteThis comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteHi Mark,
DeleteSorry for the delay in dealing with this; and now you've gone and deleted it! Anyway, the skinny is this: if you don't have a functioning central nervous system, you cannot have a consciousness, and therefore you are not a "person" in any meaningful sense whatsoever. Quintavalle's position is completely illogical.
Thanks, Shane.
DeleteAre all those who don't have a functioning central nervous system (thinking those with paralysis, for example) not "people" in a meaningful sense?
I'll assume your functional specification isn't complete or you gave me the unscientific version (or that you'll adjust your words or say that I'm being illogical).
People with paralysis do have a functioning central nervous system. They have thoughts, wishes, feelings etc. You will note that I did not specify that it had to be "perfect". Embryos do not have the capacity for any form of self awareness, and are (from a personhood point of view) no more special than the cells in your saliva. They really are just bunches of cells that have not even attained the level of organisation of a tadpole. To extend the full range of human rights to human embryos, and leave out tadpoles, cow embryos or even chimp embryos is simply bizarre and degrading. Nor is there any scientific, moral or logical reason to do so.
ReplyDeleteInteresting, thanks!
DeleteDefinitely read up on some embryology - it's unrelentingly fascinating. The processes of origami, growth, apoptosis, differentiation etc that allow an organism to develop from an undifferentiated blob of cells.
DeleteIn years gone by people believed that the semen was the "seed", and that there was effectively a wee homunculus in this seed that grew into, well, a bigger homunculus. When they invented microscopes and could actually *see* sperm, some people imagined (like Lovell's Martian canals) that they could see these little homunculi curled up in the head of the sperm.
All cobblers, of course - the reality is much more interesting. A person - a human being - is not something that gets "conceived", but something that develops from the embryonic primordia. You simply don't *have* a human being at the embryo level, but something that is developing towards that.
This is what people like Quintavalle cannot bring themselves to accept. For one thing, it removes their power over other people's decisions. But in reality I think it is simply a matter of them not being able to get their heads around the fact that we are biological organisms, formed in the chamber of the womb from the fascinating interplay of cells and feto-maternal environment, and not crafted in some heavenly factory and beamed into receptive uteri en bloc.
Happy reading! :-)
A secondary point.
DeleteThinking about inheritance in object-oriented programming and geometry here. Do you see "the embryo" as a quadrilateral and your human, cow and chimp embryos as squares, rectangles and parallelograms? In which case, would an argument against the quadrilateral be "inherited" for all other polygons with four sides (or edges) and four vertices or corners? I wondered whether the "debate" is actually about squares, rectangles and parallelograms rather than the quadrilateral which you seem to be rejecting as not scientific, moral or logical.
Just a thought.
Thanks for the comments, will have a read when I get some free time to!
DeleteHi Mark,
DeleteActually, you are raising a very very good point (thanks!) - this is exactly what, in my view, lies at the crux of the "Quintavalle error". OOP in computing is a really powerful technique, and allows you to do all sorts of great stuff, but inheritance in biological systems (including humans) does not follow the same principles. An "OOP embryo" would be an entity containing a wide range of potential attributes, and as time goes on, you clarify/reduce those to end up with something a lot more specific.
However, in biology the embryo is a system that is a precursor. It's not an object that gradually crystallises its attributes, but a work in progress that changes its behaviour and phenotype as the deterministic molecular processes unfold. In very real terms, it "evolves" into a human - the "person" that we recognise is emergent from the system. Hard to put into words, I'll admit :-)
Think of it this way - it's like a house. You've cleared the site, and the suppliers have dumped a load of bricks and mortar and timbers etc. You can't say that this is a house yet, since there are processes that have to be gone through first to actually build the house, even if the blueprints and some of the raw materials are there, or even if the founds have been dug.
Over time, if you keep your team on the job, a house will emerge, but you're not starting with a generic house that you modify/adapt as you go along.
Does that clarify? (possibly not! :-)