Therapeutic Cloning to Obtain Embryonic Stem Essay Example for Free

Therapeutic Cloning to Obtain Embryonic Stem EssayTherapeutic Cloning to Obtain Embryonic Stem Cells Is Immoral The point is to example each of us to think deeply about whether there is all essential difference between the reality of World War II Nazi experiments and therapeutic re-create. In this two-part viewpoint, David A. Prentice and William Saunders discuss the science and the ethics of therapeutic cloning. In the first part, Prentice argues that creating clones for the purpose of immature stand cell research, called therapeutic cloning, is no divers(prenominal) from productive cloning, which creates a living serviceman child. Also, he points out, therapeutic cloning is non therapeutic for the embryo. In the second part of the viewpoint, Saunders builds on Prentices argument and goes veritable(a) further. He argues that therapeutic cloning is really no different than the horrific experiments performed by the Nazis during World War II. Saunders notes that supporte rs of embryonic stem cell research plow that the research is beneficial to gentlemankind however, Saunders argues, the Nazis used this same reasoning to Justify research on the mentally ill, the disabled, and the feeble-minded.Prentice and Saunders atomic number 18 senior fellows at the Family look Council, a onservative Christian think tank and lobbying organization. As you read, consider the following questions 1. Why does Prentice claim that therapeutic cloning will lead to reproductive cloning? 2. What was the point of the Nuremberg Code, according to Saunders? 3. Why does Saunders say that therapeutic cloning violates the Nuremberg Code? Part I Cloning always starts with an embryo. The most common proficiency proposed for forgiving cloning is called somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT).This cloning is accomplished by transferring the nucleus from a kind somatic (body) cell into an testis cell which has had its chromo roughs removed or inactivated. SCNT produces a valet embryo who is virtually genetically identical to an existing or previously existing human macrocosm. Proponents of human cloning hold out two hopes for its use (1) the creation of children for infertile couples (so-called reproductive cloning), and (2) the development of medical miracles to cure diseases by harvesting embryonic stem cells from the cloned embryos of patients (euphemistically termed therapeutic cloning).All Human Cloning Produces a Human Being All human cloning is reproductive. It createsreproducesa new, developing human intend to be virtually identical to the cloned lawsuit. Both reproductive cloning and therapeutic cloning use exactly the same technique to create the clone, and the cloned embryos are indistinguishable. The process, as well as the product, is identical. The clone is created as a new, single-cell embryo and grown in the laboratory for a few days.Then it is either implanted in the womb of a surrogate mother (reproductive cloning) or finished to harv est its embryonic stem cells for experiments (therapeutic cloning). It is the same embryo, used for different purposes. In fact, the cloned embryo at that stage of development cannot be egg and sperm. Trying to call a cloned embryo something other than an embryo is not accurate or scientific. Biologically and genetically speaking, what is created is a human being its species is Homo sapiens. It is neither fish nor fowl, neither monkey nor cowit is human.Created in Order to Be Destroyed Therapeutic cloning is obviously not therapeutic for the embryo. The new human is specifically created in order to be take downed as a source of tissue C, as Robert P. Lanza and colleagues report in a 2000 JAMA article Therapeutic cloning requires the deliberate creation and disaggregation ofa human embryo. Most cloned embryos do not even survive one week, to the blastocyst stage, when they are destroy in the process of harvesting their cells. Experiments with lab animals show that even these early embryos have abnormalities in genetic expression.Beyond the abnormalities caused by the cloning procedure, embryonic stem cells from cloned embryos will still face problems for their use, including the tendency to form tumors, and significant difficulties in getting the cells to form the correct tissue and function normally. Therapeutic Cloning Leads to reproductive Cloning Because there is no difference in the nuclear transfer technique or the cloned embryo, allowing therapeutic cloning experimentation to proceed will necessarily lead to reproductive cloning. The technique can be practiced and huge numbers of cloned embryos produced.In fact, the lead scientist of the South Korean team that first cloned human embryos in February 2004 in a press conference on their experiments that the cloning technique developed in their laboratory cannot be separated from reproductive cloning. His assertion affirms what others have pointed out before allowing therapeutic cloning simply prepares the way for eproductive cloning. Human cloning is unsafe and unnecessary. There are no valid or compelling groundsscientific or medicalto proceed. A comprehensive ban on human cloning is the only sufficient answer. Part II As Dr.Prentice has shown, cloning indisputably destroys innocent human lifespan. This basic justness should lead the world to reject human cloning. However, in an effort to extricate human cloning from this ethical vise grip, its supporters attempt to draw a distinction between human life, which begins at conception, and human personhood, which begins only at their say-so. Unfortunately, the arbitrary demurrer f personhood to human beings has a long and cruel history. The Nuremberg Code, formulated in the years after World War II, is particularly instructive with involve to the authoritative debate on human cloning.For instance, when the principal author of the report on human cloning issued by the National Academy of Sciences testified before the Presidents Council on Bioethics, he stated that reproductive cloning would violate the Nuremberg Code The Nuremberg Code, with which I am in full agreement, outlines those kinds of things you would not simply do for the sake of knowledge that involve human subjects. The Nuremberg Code The Nuremberg Code is a body of ethical norms enunciated by the Nuremberg Tribunal, which, after World War II, had the responsibility of Judging the actions of the Nazis and their allies.The point of the code was to restate and book the established ethical norms of the civilized world. Nazis Deemed Some Life Unworthy Nazi laws had defined Jews and other undesirables as non-persons. Eventually, camps and killed. However, before the killing in the camps began, the Nazis had active in an extensive campaign of euthanasia against the mentally and physically handicapped, which not only foreshadowed just now also prepared the way for the xtermination camps.In his book The Nazi Doctors, Robert Jay Lifton draws our economic aid to a book titled The Permission to Destroy Life Unworthy of Life, written during the campaign. Lifton writes It was published in 1920 and written Jointly by two German professors the Jurist Karl Binding and Alfred Hoche, professor of psychiatry at the University of Freiburg. Carefully argued in the numbered-paragraph form of the traditional philosophical treatise, the book included as unworthy life not only the incurably ill but large segments of the mentally ill, the feeble-minded, and retarded and deformed children.The authors professionalized and medicalized the entire concept destroying life unworthy of life was rigorously a healing treatment and a healing work. The Nazis were determined to cleanse the genetic pool to produce better Aryans. Nazi officials announced that under the counselor of specialists all therapeutic possibilities will be administered according to the latest scientific knowledge. The result of this therapeutic treatment of inferior lives was th at eventually a network of some thirty killing areas within existing institutions was set up throughout Germany and in Austria and Poland.In their book, The Nazi Doctors and the Nuremberg Code, George Annas and Michael Grodin reveal that At the same time that agonistic sterilization and abortion were instituted for individuals of inferior genetic stock, sterilization and abortion for sinewy German women were declared illegal and punishable (in some cases by death) as a crime against the German body. As one might imagine, Jews and others deemed racially suspect were exempted from these restrictions. On November 10, 1938, a Luneberg court legalized abortion for Jews.A decree of June 23, 1943, allowed for abortions for Polish workers, ut only if they were not Judged racially valuable. Later, the Nazis created the extermination camps for the Jews and other inferior races. In the camps, Nazi doctors leadd in cruel experiments on the Jews, Gypsies, Poles, and others. They exposed the m to extreme frigid to determine the temperature at which death would occur. They injected them with poisons to see how quickly certain lethal elements moved through the circulatory system.They subjected twins to all manner of disabling and unforgiving experiments to determine how genetically identical persons reacted to different conditions. Some of the experiments were nonetheless designed to preserve lifenot of the subject, but of, for example, German pilots who were forced to parachute into frost ocean waters. Everyone agrees the Nuremberg Code prohibits reproductive cloning. What relevance does it have for therapeutic cloning? If human embryos are human beings, then therapeutic cloning, which creates an embryo only to destroy it in the process of exploiting its stem cells, violates a cardinal principle of the Nuremberg Code There is to be no experimentation on a human subject when it is known that death or disabling injury will result. Regardless of the good that might be pr oduced by such experiments, the experiments are of their very reputation an immoral use of human beings. Subverting the Meaning of Healing Recall how the Nazis subverted the meaning of healing.Recall how they used the them. Recall that the Nazis eliminated those unworthy of life in order to correct the genetic stock of Germany. Recall how the Nazis undertook lethal experiments on concentration camp inmates in order, in some cases, to find ways to preserve the lives of others. The point is not to suggest that those who support therapeutic cloning are, in any sense, Nazis. Rather, the point is to cause each of us to think deeply about whether there is any essential difference between the reality of those Nazi experiments and therapeutic cloning. As we have shown, each case involves a living human being, and that human being is killed in the aim of a perceived higher good. Cloning proponents try to distinguish between the two cases by saying that the cloned human being has no potenti al. But in each case, it is the actions of other human beings that rob the first of potential (in the first case, the actions of Nazi executioners in the second, the laboratory technicians). In either case, the human ubject is full of potential simply by being a living human being. Of course, almost miraculously, many of the inmates of the camps did survive when the allies rescued them.Equally miraculously, frigid embryos have been implanted in a womans womb and brought to live (and healthy) birth. As we have shown, every embryo is not merely potentially a life, but is an actual life, a human being from the first moment of existence. Furthermore, any living human embryo has the inherent potential to develop into a healthy baby. It is disingenuous for supporters of cloning to claim the cloned human embryo is only potential life because they plan o mandate by law that it be destroyed before it can come to birth.Regardless of its location, the human embryo, by its nature, is full of potential, unless the actions of adult human beings deprive it of the opportunity to realize that potential. Guard Against Inhuman Acts Russian author black lovage Solzhenitsyn, a man who chronicled and suffered under another ideology that denied the dignity of each and every human being, observed, Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either, but right hough every human heart, and through all human hearts. This line shifts.Inside us, it oscillates. Solzhenitsyn did not regard the perpetrators of brutal crimes in his own country as inhuman monsters. Rather, he saw the essential truththey were human beings, engaged in immoral acts. They engaged in those acts by dehumanizing the persons on whom their brutality was inflicted, and they did so in the name of (perhaps in the passionate belief in) a greater good. But Solzhenitsyn reminds us that, unless we are willing to admit that, for the best as well as for the orst of motives, we are also capable of inhuman acts, we will have no guard against committing them.No one is safe from brutality so long as we think that it is only inhuman others who are capable of inhuman acts. Rather, we will be unafraid when we are willing to look honestly at the objective reality of our acts, while realizing that we, too, are capable of acts that violate the inherent dignity of another, and refuse to engage in such acts despite the good we believe would result from doing otherwise. In the debate over the cloning and destruction of embryonic human beings, this essential truth must be our guide. Books Brian Alexander Rapture How Biotech Became the New Religion.