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Myron Genel, M.D.
Professor of Pediatrics and Associate Dean, Yale University School of Medicine; Chairman of the AMA’s Council on Scientific Affairs
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YES
Such research offers the promise of reparative therapies for many incurable conditions-such as Parkinson’s disease, spinal injury, multiple sclerosis, and diabetes-for which existing therapies are “halfway technologies,” as Dr. Lewis Thomas said.
Further, there is a great potential for growing replacement organs and tissues.
Pluripotent stem-cell research is so promising that it will inevitably take place in the private sector. Federal funding would ensure scientifically rigorous research. More important, federal oversight would provide assurances that the acquisition of discarded embryos takes place with respect and donor consent.
Furthermore, untargeted research, which will not take place without federal funding, has historically yielded the greatest dividends to medical science.
Otherwise, only research with potential commercial payoffs will be pursued.
The best way to understand serious illnesses is to understand the basic mechanisms. Understanding how the immune system or the pancreas develops may help us find better therapies for diabetes.Understanding the mechanisms that control the process by which a blastocyst gives rise to a heart, ensures the heart is in the right place, and that it has four chambers may yield new ways to prevent congenital heart disease.
A very carefully constituted federal ethics panel concluded that research on discarded
embryos is acceptable. AMA policy is in support. Congress should accept this wisdom and allow federally funded research to proceed.
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Edmund D. Pellegrino, M.D.
Director of the Center for Clinical Bioethics; Professor of Medicine, Georgetown University
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NO
I oppose any system of research that is based on destruction of living human embryos. They are members of the human species from conception and therefore have special moral status. To set a cutoff point of 14 days, prior to which an embryo may be used for research, is totally arbitrary.
It is often said that since discarded embryos are going to be disposed of anyway, they might as well be used for research. Such embryos should not have been produced in the first place, but there is a difference between the embryos’ dying and actively killing them. It is a standard principle in our ethics that you can’t do something that is intrinsically wrong even if good may come of it.
To do so in this case would desensitize society to the value of human life, threatening vulnerable members of our community. Already some ethicists call people in a permanent vegetative state “biological remnants.”
Further, legitimizing such embryo research might tempt some to produce surplus embryos for this purpose, particularly since we’ve already commercialized almost every aspect of our lives. There is a coalition of scientists eager to do the research, and there are biotechnology companies eager to profit from it.
As for getting parental consent, parents do not have the moral right to consent to the destruction of the human embryo any more than to the destruction of their own children.
Moral research alternatives are emerging. Pluripotent stem cells can be obtained from bone marrow, cord blood, and even adult brain and thymus cells. There’s nothing immoral about research using stem cells that lack the potential to develop into a human being. The congressional ban on embryo research should not be lifted.
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