Last week, a team of researchers at the Oregon Health and Science University reignited the debate over human cloning by announcing that human embryos had been cloned for the purpose of destroying them to harvest stem cells. The researchers used a cloning technique called somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT), the same technique that was used to produce Dolly the sheep about 15 years ago.
Natural conception/fertilization occurs when sperm (23 chromosomes) and egg (23 chromosomes) fuse to form a new human being (46 chromosomes). The SCNT technique does not use sperm. It harvests eggs, removes the 23 chromosome nuclei and replaces them with the 46 chromosome nuclei from a somatic (body) cell. The resulting infused egg is given an electrical charge, or bathed in chemicals to initiate embryonic development.
The Oregon researchers are the first to get cloned human embryos to survive to the blastocyst stage. At this stage of development, the embryo is comprised of an outer ring of cells which will form the amniotic sac and placenta, and the inner cell mass which forms the body of the human. This is also the stage to which embryos produced through in vitro fertilization are grown before they are implanted or frozen.
The inner cell mass contains the embryonic stem cells that will produce all the cells and tissues of the body. These are the stem cells that some researchers believe hold promise for developing cures or treatments for a variety of diseases (even though all the success so far in treating humans has been with ethically obtained "adult" stem cells!).
The ethical problem with harvesting human embryonic stem cells is that it destroys a human being in its earliest stage of development. A human embryo, regardless of how he/she comes into existence (natural human conception, in vitro fertilization or cloning) is, from its single cell stage, a human being. This isn’t my opinion, or the Church’s opinion, it is scientific fact as revealed in every human embryology textbook (see: old.usccb.org/prolife/issues/bioethic/fact298.shtml).
The primary reason researchers have long pursued the cloning of human embryos is to circumvent one of the significant obstacles for using embryonic stem cells to treat human beings: immune rejection. Stem cells harvested from a genetically distinct human embryo are considered foreign matter by an adult body’s immune system. Hence, if stem cells can be harvested from a cloned embryo that is genetically matched to the patient, his/her immune system will, theoretically, not reject those stem cells.
Sadly, there are no federal laws prohibiting the cloning of human embryos, regardless of whether they are produced to be destroyed for their stem cells or to be implanted and gestated to birth. Nebraska law, however, does prohibit state-funded institutions from cloning human embryos for any purpose.
In his statement denouncing the cloning of human embryos, Cardinal Sean O’Malley said human cloning for any purpose is inconsistent with the moral responsibility to "treat each member of the human family as a unique gift of God, as a person with his or her own inherent dignity." Cloning "treats human beings as products, manufactured to order to suit other people’s wishes… A technical advance in human cloning is not progress for humanity but its opposite."
You can contact Greg at The Nebraska Catholic Conference, 215 Centennial Mall South Suite 310, Lincoln, NE 68508; This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
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