By Richard M. Doerflinger
South Korean researchers led by Dr. Woo-Suk Hwang, the only scientists in
the world to show they had cloned human embryos and derived embryonic stem
cells (ESCs) from them, are now known to have perpetrated a massive fraud.
Contrary to past disclaimers, the team paid numerous women, and even
pressured a female researcher, to provide human eggs for cloning
experiments; they failed to produce even one stem cell line from hundreds of
attempts; and they covered up their failure by falsifying two major articles
in a prestigious U.S. science journal.
The first conclusion to be drawn from this is scientific: As the Washington
Post said January 10, "the highly touted field of embryonic stem cell
research is years behind where scientists thought it was." After eight
years of effort around the world to clone human embryos, no one has achieved
even the first step in using this procedure for human treatments (so-called
"therapeutic cloning"). The biotechnology lobby in the U.S. has held since
2001 that such cloning is essential to realizing the clinical promise of
ESCs generally.
A second lesson is political. To win public support and government funding,
ESC advocates have long made hyped claims and exaggerated promises. In
short, they acted like political hucksters instead of scientists, and now
are beginning to pay the price. Americans, too, have been bamboozled by
promises of "miracle cures" around the corner. As the San Francisco
Chronicle reported September 30, now that California voters have been
persuaded by such promises to put themselves $6 billion into debt for a huge
ESC project, they are finding that treatments are "nowhere close, maybe
decades away."
Some cloning supporters even try to blame the Bush Administration for the
hoax: Because the President didn't fund "limited" cloning, they say, the
landmark research was done in another country with no safeguards. But South
Korea had legal and professional "safeguards," which were violated for what
was seen as a greater good. Blaming this Administration for the scandal in
Korea is like blaming opponents of capital punishment for beheadings in
Iraq.
The third and most important lesson is moral. Cloning advocates have
devoted themselves to a utilitarian ethic: The end justifies the means.
Moral concerns about the sanctity of human life, and the indignity of
creating new lives in the lab simply to destroy them, were brushed aside.
Even if human embryos are lives in a biological sense, we were told, they
are not meaningful persons * and they must be sacrificed to help born
patients who really matter. Ironically, born patients (and adult women,
exploited for their eggs) have joined embryos in being victimized by this
agenda.
We should not be surprised when an ethic that dismisses "Thou shalt not
kill" in the quest for cures applies the same calculus to "Thou shalt not
bear false witness." If the embryo's "merely biological" life can be
trampled to benefit more valuable lives, can "merely factual" truth stand in
the way of the higher truth of progress?
By demeaning life, we learn to demean truth, rendering science itself
meaningless. Whether scientists and lawmakers will learn this important
lesson remains to be seen.
Mr. Doerflinger is Deputy Director of the Secretariat for Pro-Life
Activities, U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.
