Human Nature: Science, Technology, and Life.

The National Anti-Condom Committee?

Does the nation's leading pro-life organization oppose contraception?

Since 2007, the National Right to Life Committee has graded members of the House of Representatives on 10 votes. Of the first five, four were on stem cells; the other was on drug price controls. Of the most recent five, one was on abortion funding, another was on State Department appropriations, and three were on contraception. The scorecard is no longer primarily about abortion.

I'd like to think NRLC is anti-abortion, not anti-contraception. But when I apply its own standard, ignoring stated motives and focusing instead on the legislative record, I can't really defend it.

More here.

The Crackdown on Embryo Screening

Remember that bill in Georgia to restrict in vitro fertilization? The Associated Press thought it was dead. Surprise! The Georgia Senate revised it and passed it a week ago.

The bill is part of a nationwide project to regulate the emerging industry of embryo production. In one state or another—and then another and another—legislation will be filed to restrict IVF. The battles will be fought over which uses of preimplantation genetic diagnosis are acceptable. And these fights will be every bit as ugly as the preceding fights over abortion.

More here.

Drill Babies, Drill

Two arguments have persuaded the United States to fund stem-cell research using destroyed embryos. One is that the research will save lives. The other is that the embryos, left over from fertility treatments, will otherwise be wasted.

Both arguments are now being applied to fetuses.

More here.

Obama and Stem Cells, Continued

I say it's moral. So do two thinkers from opposite ends of the political spectrum. At the Hastings Center's Bioethics Forum, Daniel Callahan, a cofounder of the center, points out that supporters of stem-cell research have been wrong

to conflate opposition to stem cell research and a variety of other actions by the Bush administration. That administration was guilty of manipulating, or suppressing, scientific information on a wide range of issues, including global warming and sex education. I call that behavior patently anti-science as well as a misuse of government power. But its stem cell opposition did not encompass any distortion of the science of such research. That is not how it argued its case.

Meanwhile, in the Washington Post, Yuval Levin, a former executive director of Bush's bioethics council, argues that

science policy is not just a matter of science. Like all policy, it calls for a balancing of priorities and concerns, and it requires a judgment of needs and values that in a democracy we trust to our elected officials. ... To distort or hide unwelcome facts is surely illegitimate. But to weigh facts against societal priorities—economic, political and ethical—in making decisions is the very definition of policymakers' duty.

One reason I like these two guys is that they're clear-eyed critics of spin and self-delusion, even when the spin and delusion are coming from their own allies. On the relationship between science and politics, I particularly recommend Levin's new book, Imagining the Future: Science and American Democracy. He's right that Obama's decision doesn't moot or end the debate about using embryos. So let's honor that debate by continuing it.

Levin quotes President Kennedy, who said that many modern problems require

very sophisticated judgments which do not lend themselves to the great sort of 'passionate movements' which have stirred this country so often in the past. Now they deal with questions which are beyond the comprehension of most men.

Against this "technocratic temptation," Levin argues for democratic oversight. In principle, I agree. But the comments I've received from readers about Obama's stem-cell decision worry me. Many people on both sides seem ill-informed or self-deluded about basic scientific questions. Liberals are denying the simple fact that human embryos are the beginnings of people. Conservatives are pretending that adult stem cells are more powerful than embryonic ones. If ordinary people want to govern science policy, they need to educate themselves so they can govern well.

(By the way: To all of you who protested that torture is different from stem-cell harvesting: Of course it is. That's the nature of comparisons: The things being compared differ in many respects. The similarity in this case is that on both issues, moral objections are being dismissed as interference in a purely technical question of saving lives. That, not the merits of stem-cell research, was the point of the article.)

Second, Levin writes that in announcing his decision on Monday, Obama "argued that to deny free rein to stem cell science is to ignore and reject the promise of science as such." The president "pledged that his administration would ‘make scientific decisions based on facts, not ideology,'" and his executive order "omits any mention of ethical debate."

I think what happened Monday is more complicated than that. Based on the spin that came out of the administration over the weekend, I expected Obama to make exactly the argument Levin describes. But he didn't. Among other things, Obama said:

Many thoughtful and decent people are conflicted about, or strongly oppose, this research. I understand their concerns, and we must respect their point of view. But after much discussion, debate and reflection, the proper course has become clear. The majority of Americans ... have come to a consensus that we should pursue this research. That the potential it offers is great, and with proper guidelines and strict oversight, the perils can be avoided.

And:

I can also promise that we will never undertake this research lightly. We will support it only when it is both scientifically worthy and responsibly conducted. We will develop strict guidelines, which we will rigorously enforce, because we cannot ever tolerate misuse or abuse. And we will ensure that our government never opens the door to the use of cloning for human reproduction. It is dangerous, profoundly wrong, and has no place in our society, or any society.

Levin is right about Obama invoking facts over ideology. But that was in the context of Obama's memorandum on scientific issues generally.

It looks to me as though the administration hasn't resolved how it's going to treat these issues. The mentality Levin describes—burying moral objections and portraying embryo research as just another case of Bush's "war on science"—pervades most of the spin coming out of the White House and its feeder institution, the Center for American Progress. That's why the White House paired the stem-cell order with the announcement on restoring scientific integrity. But for some reason, Obama himself isn't entirely playing along. His remarks on Monday sounded a lot like what he has said about abortion and other social issues: acknowledging moral disagreement while striving for consensus or at least compromise. I think the administration is unresolved, and we should encourage it to acknowledge and grapple with the moral questions.

Third, Levin describes the moral question this way:

If (as modern biology informs us) conception initiates a human life, and if (as the Declaration of Independence asserts) every human life is equally deserving of some minimal protections, government support for the destruction of human embryos for research raises profound moral problems.

I cringe at this interpretation of the Declaration. Levin believes that equality means a 5-day-old embryo has the same right to life as a 5-year-old girl. I just can't buy that. I'm a gradualist. I value the 5-day-old embryo because it's on its way to becoming the 5-year-old girl. But it's not there yet. It hasn't acquired the sentience and cognition that characterize a full-fledged human being.

The Declaration says we're created with an unalienable right to liberty as well as life. But that hasn't stopped us from regulating liberties in proportion to maturity, as we do, for example, with curfews and driving. Why can't we exercise the same discretion with respect to life? Yes, life is a more basic right. But maybe that just means that instead of drawing lines after birth, as we do with liberty, we should confine our line-drawing about life to the period before birth.

Slippery slopes run both ways. Let's call that Human Nature's second law. If we don't draw moral lines against the exploitation of embryos, we may end up obliterating respect for human life generally. But if we're so afraid of that prospect that we refuse to draw lines permitting the use of any embryos under any conditions, we may end up obliterating the moral difference between embryos and full-grown people. Liberals should think seriously about the first scenario. Conservatives should think just as seriously about the second.

Torture, Stem Cells, and Scruples

The same Bush-Rove tactics are being used today in the stem-cell fight. But they're not coming from the right. They're coming from the left. Proponents of embryo research are insisting that because we're in a life-and-death struggle—in this case, a scientific struggle—anyone who impedes that struggle by renouncing effective tools is irrational and irresponsible. The war on disease is like the war on terror: Either you're with science, or you're against it.

More here.

Octuplets and Opportunism

Under a Georgia bill, if you're 39, your doctor is forbidden to fertilize more than two of your eggs per treatment cycle. Take all the hormones you can stand, make all the eggs you want, but you get two shots at creating a viable embryo, and that's it.

How does this restriction "protect the mother" and "reduce the risk of complications" for her? It doesn't. ... So why limit the number of embryos created per cycle? Because the bill's chief purpose isn't really to help women. It's to establish legal rights for embryos.

More here.

Real Resurrection

Now I'm less incredulous. Agence France Presse reports:

Japanese scientists said [Nov. 18] they had created a cloned embryo from the dead body of an endangered species of rabbit and are hoping for a birth. ... Professor Yoshihiko Hosoi of Kinki University ... said his team had extracted a cell from a dead Amami rabbit's ear and put it into the egg of an ordinary rabbit. "After we confirmed that the egg developed into a cloned embryo, we put it back into the fallopian tube of the host mother," Hosoi said. "In about 30 days the host mother may give birth to a baby rabbit which has the gene information of Amami rabbit."

Kinki, indeed. So the due date for this clone of a dead member of a dying species is somewhere in mid-December. And this comes just six months after scientists reported in PLOS One:

We isolated a transcriptional enhancer element from the genome of an extinct marsupial, the Tasmanian tiger ... obtained from 100 year-old ethanol-fixed tissues from museum collections. ... Using a transgenic approach, it was possible to resurrect DNA function in transgenic mice. ... Our method using transgenesis can be used to explore the function of regulatory and protein-coding sequences obtained from any extinct species in an in vivo model system, providing important insights into gene evolution and diversity.

There you have it: a rationale for, and pilot demonstration of, the resurrection of DNA from extinct species. Tissue taken from a museum and brought to life in a mouse.

You can save a species by cloning new members from its corpses. Or you can reactivate part of the DNA of an extinct species by integrating it into an existing species. Or you can reassemble a whole member of an extinct species (the mammoth) by incrementally reengineering its known DNA from a closely related existing species (the Indian elephant). Scientists seem to be making progress on the first two ideas. It's hard to believe they won't try the third.

Unnatural Family Planning

Friday morning, I thought I was all done investigating the ins and outs of the Chinese one-child policy. And then this happened. On Friday evening, Xinhua, the state news service, reported:

China's family planning authority are to send a medical team to conduct surgery to reverse sterilization operations on parents wanting another child in China's earthquake zone. Zhang Shikun, director of the science and technology bureau of the National Population and Family Planning Commission, said, "The team, comprised of experts on childbearing, will conduct surgery in the quake-hit areas to provide technological support for those wanting to give birth to another." The team was part of the commission's plan to provide free reproduction services, including counseling, guidance, surgery, and the implementation of artificial reproduction technology, for those who wish to have another child, she said.

You have to hand it to the Chinese government. First, they tell you not to give birth to more than one child (unless you run a farm, or you're an ethnic minority, or you and your spouse have no siblings, or a bunch of other exceptions). On the other hand, they're going all-out to make sure that if you obeyed that policy and lost your only child in the quake, you can get another.

Those tubes you tied, thinking you were done procreating? We'll untie them for you, gratis. Vasectomy? Schmectomy. In fact, if you're too old now to make babies the old-fashioned way, we'll provide "artificial reproduction technology" to help you along.

Now, that's what I call full-service public health insurance.

What's really going on here, of course, is public fury over all the kids who died in poorly built schools. The government limited those families to one child and then failed to protect their kids. The whole premise of Saving Private Ryan was that the U.S. government dare not cost a family its last child. But that's exactly what has happened in China, thousands of times over. According to Xinhua, family-planning authorities in Sichuan, the quake-hit province, estimate that 7,000 families lost their sole children in the disaster, and 16,000 sole children in other families suffered injuries or disabilities.

Through this combination of totalitarianism and incompetence, the Chinese government took away one of nature's greatest fulfillments: procreation. Now it's trying to make up for that theft by delivering surgeries and technologies to replace your lost child with a new one. You have to wonder what other options the government would be offering bereft parents in their 40s if reproductive cloning were sufficiently refined.

Would that be wrong, once the technology is safe? If the one-child limit is morally defensible, and if that child dies through government neglect, and if it's OK to use artificial technology to help the couple make a new child ... what's wrong with cloning the old one?

Go ahead, speak up. It's a free country.

Marrow With Children

If you're tired of reading about how dead Hillary Clinton is or how long it'll take her to admit it, fly with me across the Atlantic for a couple of minutes. A monumental debate is going on in the British House of Commons over the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill, which will influence how governments around the world regulate family and reproductive issues in the next century.

Everything's on the table in this free-for-all: late-term abortions, human-animal hybrids, and IVF for lesbians and unmarried women.

The liberals are steamrolling the conservatives. None of the proposed restrictions has passed. But what's really intriguing is the difference in vote counts among the various issues. It tells us something about which values people care about most. Is it life? Sex? Human dignity?

Here's how many members of Parliament voted for each proposed restriction:

A. Ban abortions after 22 weeks instead of the current 24 weeks: 233.

B. Require clinics to consider the "need for a father" in approving women for IVF: 217.

C. Ban abortions after 20 weeks: 190.

D. Ban the use of gutted animal eggs to make human embryos for research: 176.

E. Ban genetic testing of embryos to choose (for implantation and birth) those that could grow tissue for transplant to an already-born sibling: 163.

F. Ban abortions after 16 weeks: 84.

So the most popular restriction was on late-term abortions. Chalk one up for life.

But wait: The number of votes to prevent lesbian parenthood beat out the number of votes to prevent abortions after 20 weeks. From this, you could make a pretty good argument that feminists are right: Some supporters of abortion restrictions care more about regulating sex and family structure than about protecting life.

Personally, I'm sure of this. The proof is that most people who support abortion bans also support exceptions for rape and incest, where the life considerations are the same, but the sex and family-structure considerations are different.

Now look at the vote count on banning human-animal hybrids. The hybrids in question aren't equal mixtures of human and animal. They're fully human cell nuclei cloned inside eviscerated animal eggs, for lack of available human eggs. In other words, the animal contribution is minimal, almost inconsequential. Furthermore, the embryos are just for research and cell derivation, not for procreation. I'm not saying this is unobjectionable. I'm just pointing out that the degree of mixture is trivial.

Nevertheless, the number of votes to ban it is more than double the number of votes to ban abortions after 16 weeks. To that extent, "human dignity" beats out life. It seems that keeping our DNA separate from that of animals is more important than saving those second-trimester babies.

But that's still not the headline, in my book. The headline is that restrictions on lesbian IVF and trivial species mixture outpolled restriction of genetic testing to choose embryos for tissue harvesting. The common term for this practice is "savior siblings." Here's the prototypical situation: Your daughter has a serious disease. She needs compatible bone marrow. The best way to get it is for you and your spouse to make another baby and transplant its bone marrow to her. But not all your offspring will have tissue that matches hers. To guarantee a match, you need to make a batch of embryos, implant one that matches, and forget about the rest.

The happy ending is that your daughter is saved, and you've made another child to love. But you've also crossed a line. You've made a bunch of human embryos and then flushed them not because of anything wrong with them, but because they weren't useful. And if there's no tissue match, you've crossed that line for nothing.

In my view, the rise of this mentality -- the reconceptualization of human beings as medical tools and resources -- is way more dangerous than gender upheaval, species-mixing, or even abortion. Abortions, no matter what you think of them, are defensive. Tissue harvesting, on the other hand, carries an affirmative mandate. It entitles you, and arguably obliges you, to deliberately create new human life, which will then live or die based on its utility to others.

Contrary to pro-life rhetoric, there's no broad incentive to increase the number of abortions. But there's plenty of incentive to increase the number of sibling saviors. That's why sibling saviors scored so well in the House of Commons. This is one thing I've learned from covering biotechnology: Bad things don't happen because they're bad. They happen because they're good.

Keep an eye on this utilitarian mindset as we continue to take ourselves apart. As the British debate illustrates, it'll be hard to stop.

Little Green Men

The genetically engineered humans are here! The genetically engineered humans are here!

I didn't believe it when I heard the report was in the Sunday Times of London. This, after all, is the paper that butchered the gay sheep story and can't find any evidence to back up its disputed paraphrases of James Watson. But the original report, which the Sunday Times neglects to mention, turns out to have been published in a scientific journal, Fertility and Sterility. It's titled, "Genetic modification of preimplantation embryos and embryonic stem cells (ESC) by recombinant lentiviral vectors: efficient and stable method for creating transgenic embryos and ESC."

For those of you who don't have access to the pricey journal, the New York Times boils down the experiment: Scientists "put a gene for a fluorescent protein into the single-celled human embryo," and "after the embryo divided for three days, all the cells in the embryo glowed."

What's new in this experiment isn't genetic modification of humans. We've already done that in limited doses, through the same viral technique. What's new is that because this was a single-celled embryo, every cell it went on to produce, including egg and sperm cells, would (except for the diploid-haploid transition, which gets complicated) carry the same genetic tweak. If the embryo were implanted and grew into an adult, its fluorescent gene would be passed down like any other. This is called germline modification. If you wanted to transform our species or give your offspring an advantage that persists through generations, this is how you'd do it.

Naturally, genetic watchdog groups are freaked out. Human Genetics Alert calls it a prelude to "eugenics" and "designer babies" and demands an "international moratorium on such experiments." The Center for Genetics and Society says it "could push us toward a GATTACA-like world" dominated by "the genetically enhanced."

The scientists, based at Cornell University, offer several responses. First, they used no U.S. federal funds, so no legal restrictions were violated. Second, the gene conveyed no enhancements; it was just a green "marker" to help them see whether it was replicated in subsequent cell divisions. Third, the experiment "was done on an embryo that was never going to be viable," due to pre-existing chromosomal defects. Fourth, they destroyed the embryo after five days, as required by a Cornell review committee.

The watchdog groups are alarmed because Britain's parliament is presently debating legislation to lift restrictions on human embryonic genetic modification. (See yesterday's post about the bill's pregnant-man loophole.) But proponents of the legislation point out that the law would still ban growing such embryos beyond 14 days or transferring them to a womb.

When you line up the points made by scientists and liberalizers, it's easier to understand what's really going on here. It's not that we're plowing unimpeded toward genetic engineering of children. To the contrary, we've drawn lines to prevent that: the 14-day limit and the no-implantation rule. What's going on is that by drawing these lines, we've created a zone where virtually no legal or moral rules apply. Look at the American and British treatment of cloning, and you'll see the same pattern. You can clone embryos, mix species, and engineer all you want, as long as you don't implant the embryos or grow them beyond 14 days.

Maybe this system will allow us to make important scientific discoveries and conquer diseases without crossing the lines we've drawn. On the other hand, maybe it'll turn embryos into a testing ground for techniques that we'll use for people-engineering when we're ready to go there. Or maybe we'll relax the rules a bit at a time, extending our techniques to more advanced embryos as we test and refine them. We'll tell ourselves that we're curing genetic diseases in the womb so that babies and their babies will be born healthy.

The argument for the latter scenario is that, far from being diabolical, the idea of loosening the 14-day rule makes a lot of sense. The Cornell scientists point out that genetically modified embryos "could be used to study how diseases develop" and that "in order to be sure that the new gene had been inserted and the embryo had been genetically modified, scientists would ideally need to grow the embryo and carry out further tests." The longer you grow the embryo, the more you learn.

How long could we grow genetically modified embryos if we lift the 14-day rule? According to the New York Times, "A spokesman for the National Institutes of Health said the Cornell work would not be classified as gene therapy in need of federal review, because a test-tube embryo is not considered a person under the regulations." Roughly speaking, U.S. law confers personhood at viability. That's five months or so. Plenty of time for good work to be done.

I don't mean to make this scenario sound imminent. But as we ease ourselves into the world of genetic engineering, let's notice what we're doing. We're chalking off a zone where the ethics of human manipulation don't apply, on the grounds that the human entities we're manipulating aren't human beings. Seven years ago, scientists and supportive ethicists set up a similar ethics-free zone based on origin: Human embryos produced by fertilization were protected, while those produced by cloning were fair game. Now we've shifted to lines based on age and location.

Will these lines hold? You can't dismiss the fear that they won't as slippery-slope nonsense from the anti-abortion crowd. Embryo research is fundamentally different from abortion. If you're a woman with an unwanted pregnancy, you have no incentive to prolong it. But if you're a scientist with an embryo modified for research, you have lots of good reasons to keep growing it and studying it. The only things holding you back are your conscience, your review board, and the law.

Here's my prediction: We won't end up extending species-mixing beyond the 14-day line. Nor will we end up deliberately growing embryos past that point for harvestable tissue, as I previously speculated. But we will extend germline genetic engineering all the way through pregnancy and beyond, and our grandchildren will wonder why it was ever controversial.

A Womb Without a Woman

Today I've been reading up on the trans-Atlantic news about a genetically modified human embryo. I'll have some thoughts on that shortly. In the meantime, while reading Britain's Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill as part of my research, I noticed what might be a loophole. I'll point it out here, since the bill is being debated by the British parliament right now.

The bill proposes to lift previous restrictions on tinkering with human embryos. To reassure critics and the public, it promises to prevent altered embryos from growing into people. Here's the relevant legislative language:

No person shall place in a woman—

(a) an embryo other than a permitted embryo (as defined by section 3ZA), or

(b) any gametes other than permitted eggs or permitted sperm (as so defined). ...

No person shall place in a woman—

(a) a human admixed embryo,

(b) any other embryo that is not a human embryo, or

(c) any gametes other than human gametes.

Now, here's my question: Is Thomas Beatie a woman? Here's his first-person account, published seven weeks ago in the Advocate:

I am transgender, legally male, and legally married to Nancy. ... Sterilization is not a requirement for sex reassignment, so I decided to have chest reconstruction and testosterone therapy but kept my reproductive rights. ... I always wanted to have children. However, due to severe endometriosis 20 years ago, Nancy had to undergo a hysterectomy and is unable to carry a child. ... [So] I stopped taking my bimonthly testosterone injections. ... My body regulated itself after about four months, and I didn't have to take any exogenous estrogen, progesterone, or fertility drugs to aid my pregnancy.

How did he get pregnant? By using donated sperm, as millions of women have done. He reports:

On successfully getting pregnant a second time, we are proud to announce that this pregnancy is free of complications and our baby girl has a clean bill of health. ... Despite the fact that my belly is growing with a new life inside me, I am stable and confident being the man that I am. In a technical sense I see myself as my own surrogate, though my gender identity as male is constant.

Beatie says his initial attempt at pregnancy produced ectopic triplets, which cost him a fallopian tube and could have killed him. So he has good reasons to do IVF and screen his embryos. Suppose doctors find a genetic flaw in his next embryo and can fix it. That's human germline modification. The British bill says the altered embryo can't be placed in a woman. But under the law, Beatie isn't a woman. He's a man.

I'll let you lawyers sort it out. But it sure looks like a loophole to me.