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The Washington Post, 25 de agosto de 2000 A Stem Of Hope By Marjorie Williams In issuing final guidelines this week to allow federal funding of research involving stem cells drawn from human embryos, the National Institutes of Health is doing the right thing. Stem cells, which have the ability to reproduce and to develop into all the other, more specialized types of cells in the human body, may ultimately help sufferers of Parkinson's disease, Alzheimer's disease, heart ailments, stroke, burns, arthritis, diabetes, cancer and more. For victims of traumatic injury or those with failing organs, stem cell research might eventually yield a renewable source of new tissue, or even new organs. And although there is great progress in research involving cells drawn from adults, the science so far points to the conclusion that embryonic cells are a resource too promising to pass up. But if you look closely at the guidelines, you find a strange mix of politics and science, one that illuminates just how blindly we step up to the ethical dilemmas posed by our spectacular technology. The guidelines are NIH's effort to get around a congressional prohibition, in place since 1996, on the funding of research using human embryos. As a result, it is a document replete with the little lies by which we tell ourselves that we have finessed our deepest moral clashes. Under the NIH rules, scientists who obey certain conditions may be funded to experiment with the stem cells derived from very early embryos--ones less than two weeks old--as long as the embryos are among the thousands left over from infertility treatments, which are destined for destruction in any case; and as long as the researchers don't themselves destroy the embryos to harvest the stem cells. There are further cautions embedded in the rules: that no one be paid for embryos, for example; that donors not be allowed to control the use of the tissue (to avoid anyone's creating an embryo for the benefit of a family member); and that the specimens be taken from frozen embryos, to ensure that some time elapsed between the parents' decisions to create them and to donate them. But the two big decisions embodied in the guidelines are those barring federal scientists from creating or destroying embryos. These were probably both wise calls politically, but political they are: From an ethical point of view, they are almost arbitrary, and may do more to obscure than to clarify the central debate over whether it is ever permissible to use one human life--or, if you will, potential life--in service of the lives of others. The really disingenuous part of the guidelines is the prohibition on federally funded scientists "deriving" the cells themselves. This limitation serves no real purpose except to evade the ongoing congressional ban on funding of embryo research. NIH's legal reasoning is that if federally funded scientists are working only on the stem cells, and not on the full mass of embryonic cells that includes cells necessary to form a placenta, then they are not experimenting on embryos. Set aside, for a moment, the fact that this prohibition to some degree inhibits researchers' ability to learn everything possible about the cells. There is something disturbing about the way the legal evasion here dons the clothes of a moral one, suggesting that taxpayers can claim the fruits of this research while washing our hands of what troubles us about it. For that matter, does using frozen embryos do anything more than give us another veil with which to obscure the reality that this kind of research--unlike research on fetal tissue, in which scientists come on the scene after parents have aborted a fetus--involves destroying the embryo? Would creating new organisms for research really be ethically darker than this silent social decision to advance our health by experimenting on embryos created as spares for infertile couples? NIH thought not back in 1994, when it adopted a plan that included the clinical manufacture of embryos. Most of us probably do feel an added level of squeamishness at such a prospect, as President Clinton acknowledged in overruling that element of the plan by executive order. But a truly rational assessment might say that creating embryos from scratch is the more morally neutral path, since it openly serves the palliation of illness rather than benefiting after the fact from the personal projects of individuals who act on their own private motives outside the reach of scientific review. It is certainly convenient that our respect for the privacy of decisions about child-bearing should have such a happy fringe benefit. And there is at least a moral irony in federal scientists' finding an ethical loophole here, because it relies in part on the government's past failure to grapple successfully with whether it should have played a role in regulating the laissez-faire science of fertility-boosting. Under the circumstances, NIH probably threaded the needle of political realism with as much integrity as it could; even the limited research it approves may be killed in Congress. But the rest of us need to work at recognizing what the NIH can't afford to, which is that all the fine distinctions in the world don't alter the moral ambiguity of this kind of research.
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