"This transcript has not been edited or
corrected, but rather appears as received from the commercial
transcribing service. Accordingly, the President's Council on
Bioethics makes no representation as to its accuracy."
THIRD MEETINGThursday, April 25,
2002
Session 7: Public
Comments
CHAIRMAN KASS: Let
me ask the Council's consent to -- if I'm not mistaken, we have
three public comments on the list. Is that correct? Three?
Would Council -- rather than take the scheduled break, and
then reconvene, since we have I think public testimony from three
people, could we take this now and then adjourn afterwards, since
we're already together and we don't want to make lots of people sit
extra time? If all these people are here. We did say it was going to
be at 12:00.
So is Mo Woltering from the American Life
League here? And is Richard Doerflinger here? And is Susan Poland
here? Is that the right pronunciation.
MS. POLAND: Poland.
CHAIRMAN KASS: Poland? Would you
mind going -- if we began now? Then, let's go in that order. Mo
Woltering of the American Life League, please step to the
microphone. It's on.
MR.
WOLTERING: I'd like to thank Dr. Kass and all the
members of the Council for the opportunity to present these remarks.
I'm the Director of Public Policy for American Life League.
My remarks today center around a very simple fact that's
been scarcely mentioned in the discussions of this Council and even
the larger national and international debate surrounding embryonic
stem cell research and human cloning. However, I believe this fact
has a profound significance for the discussion that is currently
taking place.
The controversy surrounding embryonic stem
cell research and human cloning eventually returns to the debate
over the moral status and value of the human embryo.
And
with this in mind, I would like to ask the Council to reflect for a
moment on one simple fact: that human embryos are either boys or
girls. This is an indisputable fact that's very seldom mentioned.
The human embryo, from the very first moment of life as a
single-celled embryo, is either a boy or a girl. That is, either a
male or female.
Every high school student, in fact, learns
this in biology class. One's sex is determined by chromosomes which
are present at the very beginning of one's life as a single-celled
creature. So I would ask you to keep in mind that when you are
talking about human embryos you are talking about male and female
human embryos. Knowing that every human embryo is either a boy or a
girl adds an important perspective to the moral status and value of
the human embryo.
One's sex is probably the most fundamental
component of one's personal identity. And we know this when we
reflect upon ourselves. We also know this when we reflect upon our
everyday encounters. The sex of a person is the first thing we
notice when we meet people on the street, and it's a major
determinant of how we interact with people.
We will never be
able to empirically confirm the presence of the soul, but we know
that in order for a person to exist a living, human body must exist.
And we know that human bodies essentially come in only two forms --
male and female.
At the single-cell stage, we can identify a
living male or female human body. At the most -- one of the most
fundamental components of personal identity is present at this very
beginning stage of life. I believe that this alone is enough reason
to recognize the personal rights of the human embryo.
So I
think here we must be honest. Many are apprehensive about
recognizing the rights of male and female human embryos.
As
we all know, many widely accepted practices subject human embryos to
death. Here I'm referring to the practices of IVF, embryonic stem
cell research, even contraceptive practices which prevent the
implantation of the embryo.
Clearly, if we were to boldly
recognize the personal rights and the dignity of the human embryo,
we must then reject all these practices that I have just mentioned.
The President's Council on Bioethics has a critical teaching
opportunity here. History is filled with examples of societies that
accepted a mistaken understanding of human dignity, and they allowed
horrible crimes to take place against innocent people, yet people
came together to correct those mistakes and to defend the dignity of
the person.
You have a chance to lead Americans to a renewed
understanding of human dignity, and I ask that you overcome all the
apprehension. Human embryos are either boys or girls.
Thank
you.
CHAIRMAN KASS:
Thank you very much.
Richard Doerflinger, United States
Conference of Catholic Bishops.
MR.
DOERFLINGER: Thank you. I wasn't going to address
the Council again, but when I saw such a short list I decided to
help the members earn their per diems.
I want to begin by
saying how honored I was to be given respectful attention by Dr.
Outka in the session yesterday. I want to offer two clarifications
on his description of my views there, however. He seems to attribute
to me the view that there is no moral difference between destroying
so-called spare embryos and specially creating embryos for research
that will destroy them.
And he also says that John Robertson
accepts my point on that in order to point to the opposite moral
conclusion about both.
First, it was really Dr. Robertson's
point to which I was responding. My paper was written as a response
to Robertson's. But, more importantly, I don't think I've ever
argued there's no moral difference between the two practices.
Obviously, I think the practice of specially creating
embryos simply to destroy them for research is more morally
abhorrent in more ways, just as it would be more horrific to
conceive a child solely in order to abort her for organs than to
abort in some other circumstances. My point is just that that does
not mean the other abortions are morally right.
The point I
was trying to make is this: there is often some measure of
selfishness in our reasons for conceiving children, just as in our
reasons for doing many other things. As a Catholic, I tend to
attribute that to original sin.
For example, in having a
child, I may have in the back of my mind that I would like this
child to go to college and achieve things that I never did, to give
myself some vicarious satisfaction. And in that sense, I am treating
that child partly as a means.
But this becomes much more
problematic if we are treating our offspring as mere means in ways
that do them great harm for the benefit of others. And if we explore
our reasons why so many of us, quite rightly, strongly object to
creating embryos in order to do them harm for research, we will find
in our feelings the roots of an argument that it is wrong to harm
embryos generally. But I didn't equate the two practices.
Secondly, I wanted to comment briefly on the slippery slope.
I wanted to confirm what Dr. Krauthammer said yesterday. During the
debate on use of spare embryos in Congress, every member of
Congress, every Senator, claimed to oppose specially creating
embryos for research, by cloning or other means.
Outside
research groups and patient advocacy groups declared the same
ethical position, arguing, for example, that the Clinton guidelines
on stem cell research kept this research within ethical limits
precisely by excluding any involvement in special creation of
embryos for research.
But when the debate switched to
cloning for research, many of these Senators and outside groups
immediately switched their position and endorsed what they had
previously condemned.
I am tempted to agree with what Dr.
Rowley said yesterday that this was not a slippery slope, that these
people always knew where they wanted to go in the end. But that
seems to suggest that they were simply being deceptive in their
first position and raises the question why we should believe some of
their claims now.
The rule "fool me once, shame on you; fool
me twice, shame on me" seems to hold here. I do think there was a
great deal of insincerity in the earlier claims to share moral
concerns of the rest of us about specially creating.
My
point is simply that I have no reason to believe that the slope does
not extend further down. I want to raise two things about -- does
this stop with the embryo?
The latest bill, alternative bill
to be introduced -- and it has been called a compromise by its
sponsors, S.2076 -- does not, like some previous bills, ban the
implantation of cloned embryos in the womb. It allows the
implantation of cloned embryos in the womb, as long as that is not
done for the purpose of "creating a cloned human being" by which I
assume we mean a born human being or the bill would be incoherent.
In other words, this latest bill already endorsed by some
Senators would allow implanting cloned embryos in the womb, to grow
them to a certain stage of gestation at any time before birth, and
then kill them for their organs.
The other reality is that
when asked to proffer examples in animal models of what therapeutic
claims can be made for therapeutic cloning, supporters have noted
two studies. The first involves trying to make new kidney tissue for
cows, but it required growing the cow embryos, the cloned cow
embryos to fetal stage and then harvest their kidneys.
The
second was an attempt to cure an immune deficiency in mice, and that
did not work until they actually brought the embryo to live birth
and then harvested its adult stem cells for treatment in the
original mouse. In fact, there are no models at this point of
therapeutic cloning that stays at the embryonic stage.
And I
would like to offer for any Council members who are interested a
document that offers a little snapshot of the advances that are
being made now against some of these diseases without using any
embryonic stem cells or cloning.
Thank you.
CHAIRMAN KASS: Thank you very
much. If you'd give the documents to the staff table, we'll see that
everybody receives these.
The last comment is from Susan
Poland speaking as a private citizen. Ms. Poland, welcome.
MS. POLAND: Thank
you. Mr. Chairman, members of the Council, my name is Susan Poland,
and I work as a library researcher for the Bioethics Library at
Georgetown University.
However, I am speaking only on myself
and on behalf of no other entity. I'm also speaking from my
experience as one of the first 10 women police officers in New
Hampshire, and also as one of the first four lab techs in basic
reproductive research at the Jones Institute in Norfolk, Virginia.
Recently, I co-authored a bibliography on cloning. Others I
had done were on gene patenting and bioethics commissions. So I'm
also speaking from what I learned from those.
And I have two
basic insights, one comment on terminology, and then I'd like to
really spend most of the comment time on illustrating what it was
like to be, in 1985, a first-hand account of doing unregulated in
vitro fertilization basic research.
First, a clone is a
group of genetically identical offspring or progeny. It implies
birth, and, therefore, I think that reproductive cloning is
redundant, and therapeutic cloning is a misnomer and misleading,
like gene therapy is. I would like to see you use the term "IVD" for
in vitro division or duplication.
If you're going to have
implantation into the uterus in hopes of a pregnancy, IVD/ET, just
like IVF means in vitro fertilization, not necessarily followed by
implantation, or IVF/ET.
My first comment or insight in
working on the cloning bibliography is that the U.S. patent system
is the most powerful and most unique law enforcement regulation that
this particular government has for controlling research done abroad
and in the U.S. You cannot really regulate the scientific research,
but you can regulate and control access to the patent system.
And I was expecting or hoping that like you have IRBs or a
super IRB for FDA, you would have something like RAC, because the
patent system right now is overextended. It does over 10,000 patents
applications in one year. It took over 40 years to reach the first
10,000 applications. Those people are not qualified, I believe, for
adequately evaluating whether or not research is done correctly
under bioethical principles.
Second insight -- that was a
short-term insight. A long-term insight is that the legacy, I
believe, of this group will be its impact on human, and the
definition of human to further councils and lawyers in the future,
maybe not in my daughter's generation but the generation following
that.
If you take a look at what's happening with
cooperative robotics, autonomous robots that are making decisions, I
wonder if we're going to define "human" as one cell, whether it's an
embryo or what, and go back to the racist policies or miscegenation
and one drop of blood.
And now I'd like to go into
explaining what it was like to be a person that walks into a
bioethic -- excuse me, into a basic reproductive research laboratory
with a background in law enforcement when you had a .38 Smith &
Wesson on your hip, but you also had some experience with bioethics
and the issues.
The first time I was there they looked at me
like, well, are you going to stop the conversation talking about
law, or are you going to just tell us what to do as a bioethicist?
And I told them, "No, bioethics is not a badge."
Lawyers
have -- lawyers and policemen have judges. They give you a final
decision. Bioethicists and theologians have no judge. And so the
discussion continued, and they would talk, and it was a very small
group. It was very similar to what I believe 19th century Britain
was for discussing science.
We had close communications. I
worked with Gary Hodgen, who you may know left NIH in 1984 because
he could no longer do embryo research as a bureau chief. And the
Joneses -- Howard and George-Anna Jones had left Johns Hopkins
sometime before because they were no longer allowed to teach because
they had reached the age of 70.
So we were working with our
small group. And, like I said, I was one of the first four. There
were close ties to Patrick Steptoe and John Edwards in England.
Everyone knew everything. This was in the age when there were no
faxes. Well, they were relatively new. No cell phones, no internet.
You were lucky to get things.
And at the time, in the U.S.,
what had happened with us doing basic research was a scarcity of
materials. We were working basically with animals, and, when we
could get them, human materials. But because of the fall of the
Marcos regime, we were not allowed to get very many primates. They
are very hard to get. And when you could find a monkey to work on,
if you were using human material, just like with vaccines, three
times of exposure to human hormonal material would immunize the
monkey and you would no longer get valid results.
So,
consequently, a good deal of research in IVF was done using the
litter-bearing models of mice, which their ovaries do not react the
same as, say, a singleton birth.
At the same time when we
were sitting there, I remember one of the business meeting
discussions like, well, what do you think? Do you think we should
screen for AIDS? That seems to be a new disease. And you know what
has happened since then.
I also sat in a meeting with
Etienne Balieu, who was running Roussel-Uclef. We were doing work on
RU-486 with one other woman. It was a small group of men and us two
women. We were the only two people that thought we still agree with
diaphragms, because we like control of our own bodies. Forget about
giving us drugs that we can't shut out or whatever.
At the
same time we were working with RU-486 on monkeys who were giving
still birth, or the newborns would die relatively soon,
Roussel-Uclef had signed an agreement with the Chinese government to
test on people. When you have a policy of one birth or less, it's
very easy to allow your people to go sterile.
Also, at the
same time, in the summer of 1985, a professor named Akira Iritani,
who is still in practice and still working today, came over. And it
was sort of like the beginning of 2001 when you see the bone going
up in the air from the cave man, and you see the space ship.
We had just gotten our first micromanipulator, a Japanese
machine that Professor Iritani had used quite a bit. He had a
graduate student, much like Briggs & King -- King being the
expertise for Briggs with all the insight. He had a graduate student
when he showed us at the end of his term staying with us that could
do two to three hundred embryos in an afternoon, splicing them,
which we would call now embryo-splitting or blastomere separation.
And one of the slides at the very end was a picture of five
identical goats born by an eight-cell embryo. And I thought my God,
there you have the perfect drug testing system for a pharmaceutical
company. I have as yet, as a professional researcher, to see
anything in print. If you have any sway with people at the NIH, both
at NLM and with research to get more Japanese work put out into the
U.S. mainstream for people to know, that would be very nice.
China obviously takes one view based on a Confucian and
socialist system, or a Communist system, rather, of human life.
Japan takes a different view. Professor Iritani shocked even me when
I discovered that in January this year he announced that his group
and a different university is viewing genetic engineering -- had
actually inserted a spinach gene into a pig, and then produced two
successive birth generations. From my Western mind, I don't mix
plant and animal kingdoms.
And then, lastly, back in 1985,
we were there watching what was happening in 1984 with the Medical
Infertility Procedures Act when it was passed in Australia in
Victoria. And the "hot dogs and cowboys" were going to be put in
their place by the legislators.
Well, they certainly did.
They emigrated to the U.S. as IVF Australia, became IVF America, and
today they are now IntegreMed, Incorporated, responsible for
one-sixth of all IVF births in the U.S., and our local outlet is
Shady Grove Adventist Hospital.
So I feel that when
Australia came into the U.S., what basically we lost was that very
close-knit tie of research and clinical care, because it suddenly
overwhelmed the system and it became just clinical care and
consumers.
When I was working there in Norfolk doing basic
research, we got human materials. There was a pecking order. Any
human material was first used for patient care, and those people
there would decide which ones were the best ones with the best
opportunity of going on to help these people that wanted to have
babies.
Anyone else would come second for research, mind you
that not the best-looking embryos always were the best ones that
went and implanting. So we had to rely on their judgment.
We
did use cadaver eggs. I'm grateful for the one woman that did donate
her ovarian tissue. But the eggs, of course, were dead, as I believe
many of the 100,000 embryos are that are sitting around in the
nitrogen tanks throughout the country.
But both groups, the
clinical practice and basic research, were in service together on
improving care. I've never seen such a group of remarkable people
with high esprit de corps.
And there wasn't a feeling that
this is a researcher-subject relationship or a doctor-patient
relationship. We were more or less fiduciaries, trying to do best
for individual people and yet also trying to do best for society by
improving the science.
My own feelings about the moral
evaluation of this, having been given the power to use my own
judgment when I was 23 to use deadly force to kill a person if I had
to, was that this wasn't destruction of embryos. This was actually
loss. There was a real grief every time we had to kill an animal or
lost an embryo that we just didn't work.
I'm sorry. Am I
over my limit? Is that just some --
CHAIRMAN KASS: No, that's just
some -- that's just some --
MS.
POLAND: Okay. And today I know that talk about the
Human Embryology Authority and CCNE in France, while they have asked
and joined Germany to put a ban through, or look at regulating human
embryo research and, in particular, cloning, they also -- the CCNE
has asked the President to look at establishing its own authority
like the HEFA.
They also use, by the way, the British term,
which is cellular nuclear -- cell nuclear -- CNR. I'm sorry. Cell
nuclear replacement I believe is what it is.
I was going to
ask you, and then respectfully request, and actually I think the
term I want is beg -- beg you to regulate this. It was very scary to
do IVF, which is fertilized or sexual reproduction, and now you're
looking at in vitro asexual reproduction. To do it in an unregulated
atmosphere because you didn't know what you were going to do, if you
were going to hurt someone, and where the government would draw the
line suddenly.
And that's about all I can do is ask --
there's a balancing mechanism. My own -- as I started to say, my own
moral feelings about this, having been given deadly force, I have
discovered have changed. And they evolve the more and more
information I take in.
Thank you.
CHAIRMAN KASS: Thank you very
much.
Did you want to say something, Janet?
DR. ROWLEY: I just wanted to
correct Ms. Poland in terms of the definition of cloning, because
cloning has been used in the biological community for many, many
years. And its first use is -- that I am aware of was really when
you had a cell line, you knew that it was heterogeneous, and you
wanted to take the cells in that cell line and begin new cell lines
derived from a single cell, and that was called cloning.
So
that, then, you had a homogeneous cell line derived from this
heterogeneous cell line. So it in no way implies live birth.
CHAIRMAN KASS:
Thank you.
Any comments? Could I ask -- is Ms. Poland still
here? Could I just ask, as a point of information, are you aware of
-- this is a question, too, as librarian. Are you aware of any
overarching study on the practice of IVF along these lines? I mean,
has there been any review studies that we -- that --
MS. POLAND: On the safety of IVF?
CHAIRMAN KASS: No,
not on the safety. Just on, in fact, the practice. I mean, you were
talking really something about the unregulated character or the
practice, the profession -- the society has its own guidelines,
which it has -- which it has promulgated, and most of the members of
that society abide by it. But there are also other groups that do
this practice that are not members of the society. Is there any --
are there any studies?
MS.
POLAND: For clinical care, I'm not aware of any. And
by the way, I did give Ms. Zwanziger one cite, which is the Hayflick
1965 cite, which relates to -- it's a seminal article about the
number of times you can actually reproduce a cell. It's supposed to
be 50 generations, and I explained to her about checking to see if
additional -- but I can look into that if you'd like, if you can
tell me later more --
CHAIRMAN
KASS: We'll make the request more precise, and we
might be in touch with you. Thank you very much.
MS. POLAND: Okay.
CHAIRMAN KASS: Robby George, and
then --
DR. GEORGE:
Yes. Can I ask Richard Doerflinger a question?
CHAIRMAN KASS: Is Richard still
here? Yes, please, Richard.
DR.
GEORGE: Richard, since you're here, I thought I
could get an answer to a question that frequently comes up, and it's
this. Does the position of the Catholic Bishops Conference, or the
Catholic Church generally, on the issue of the moral status of the
embryo and what public policy ought to be on that depend on a view
about the infusion of a spiritual soul in the early embryo?
MR. DOERFLINGER:
No. There have been a lot of speculations during the course of
Catholic history about ensoulment. Even during times when people
thought they were pretty sure based on the biology of Aristotle and
the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas that the early embryo was not
ensouled, it still rejected abortion as an act that shows disrespect
for this developing life that has a human destiny, that God is at
the very least forming to prepare for a soul.
The current
teaching is that abortion and destruction of embryos is wrong, first
of all, because it destroys a living member of the human species,
and that that's enough to deserve our respect.
And,
secondly, that since we cannot be sure that the early embryo is not
-- does not have an immortal soul that when you are destroying that
embryo you in addition risk the full gravity of killing a human
person in the full sense. But ensoulment is not the factor that
means the difference between moral right or wrong or even the
difference between something that would be seen as an abortion as
versus contraception. Is that --
DR. GEORGE: Yes, that answers it.
Thank you.
CHAIRMAN
KASS: Thank you very much.
Thank you all for
your wonderful work, your endurance. The meeting is adjourned.
(Whereupon, at 12:18 p.m., the proceedings in the
foregoing matter were adjourned.)
back
to
top
|
