I did­n’t real­ly say any­thing when sci­en­tists announced a poten­tial new way to gen­er­ate stem cell lines. The tech­nique involves extract­ing one cell from a blas­tu­la, just as is done in nor­mal in vit­ro fer­til­iza­tion for genet­ic test­ing, and then grow­ing that one cell into a stem cell line, while the rest of the embryo could be allowed to devel­op nor­mal­ly, or get tossed in the incin­er­a­tor if it isn’t used. 

Peo­ple thought it might rep­re­sent some sort of way around the objec­tions raised by reli­gious groups. I nev­er real­ly thought so because they aren’t defin­ing life in a way that’s sci­en­tif­i­cal­ly divis­i­ble. They see the fer­til­ized egg and all its prod­ucts as liv­ing, and are a lit­tle fuzzy on whether an egg and sperm are moral­ly equiv­a­lent to human life even before fertilization. 

Fel­low Sci­ence­Blog­ger The Sci­en­tif­ic Activist points out how this dynam­ic plays with the South­ern Bap­tist Con­ven­tion. Tech­ni­cal dodges just won’t resolve the issue. The solu­tion isn’t to accom­mo­date every Lud­dite, it’s to inform the pub­lic and build sup­port for basic research. There is an eth­i­cal debate going on, one that cen­ters on tricky issues of how to draw the line between life and non-life, and what it means for some­thing to be human life. 

Argu­ing about how to gen­er­ate lines with­out engag­ing the eth­i­cal and moral issues head-on won’t be productive.

This is a prob­lem in oth­er areas. Peo­ple’s objec­tions to evo­lu­tion aren’t dri­ven by the sci­en­tif­ic data, they are dri­ven by a set of moral quan­daries. You and I might not see those same issues the way they do, but under­stand­ing what both­ers peo­ple keeps the debate from get­ting stuck.

Stem cell research oppo­nents wor­ry about two things. First, they wor­ry about research that could blur the bright line they see between humans and all oth­er life. The idea that human cells could be grown with genes from oth­er organ­isms just squicks them on a deep lev­el. Sure, humans might use insulin pro­duced by oth­er species, and are glad to have the prod­ucts of trans­genic organ­isms. But humans are spe­cial, and they want that dis­tance. That’s where peo­ple start talk­ing about chimeras and man­i­mals in oppos­ing stem cell research. It also con­nects to the rhetoric about “fetus farm­ing.” Exact­ly what that is remains obscure to me, but it plays on fears that sci­ence will treat humans like animals.

The oth­er, relat­ed, issue is that they see human life as a bina­ry char­ac­ter­is­tic. There is life and there is non-life, with no grey in between. Just because actu­al prac­tice dif­fers, because we are destroy­ing that one cell any­way, because a fer­til­ized egg has obvi­ous dif­fer­ences from a babe in arms, that does­n’t change those concerns. 

Inci­den­tal­ly, these sorts of issues also crop up in evo­lu­tion debates. Humans are spe­cial, and the rad­i­cal egal­i­tar­i­an­ism of evo­lu­tion, the idea that humans evolved by the same process and from the same stock as all of life, just rubs some peo­ple wrong. If humans aren’t spe­cial, then what – they won­der – makes us moral. 

What that means is that peo­ple who work in stem cells or evo­lu­tion­ary biol­o­gy, and doc­tors who deal in birth and death every day, need to be bet­ter about shar­ing their expe­ri­ences. Peo­ple made a com­fort­able shift from see­ing death as occur­ring when the heart stops to mea­sur­ing it by when the brain stops because sci­en­tists and doc­tors showed how that made sense. That shift made organ trans­plan­ta­tion pos­si­ble, since the heart has to be kept beat­ing up to organ removal. The solu­tion to the prob­lem involved a shift­ing of def­i­n­i­tions, but also a con­cert­ed effort to reshape opin­ions about what death (and life) means. The same shift is nec­es­sary to resolve the prob­lems with stem cells. They new tech­nique makes the con­ver­sa­tion nec­es­sary, it does­n’t resolve the issue.