Ethics and Embryos

There's a really interesting series of 5 articles this week on Slate about embryonic research titled, somewhat alarmingly, "The Case for Harvesting Older Human Embryos."

I won't pretend to understand the science behind it all, but here are some of the main points that I gathered:

To get transplantable tissue from an embryo that your body won't reject, you need a clone from your own cell line. Current ethics in the field prohibit preservation of cloned embryos after 14 days, at which point the cells begin to differentiate and are no longer useful for embryonic stem cell research. (His explanation of the reasons behind the 14 day rule are laid out in part 3) The author argues that:

But if the goal is tissue, clones aren't less useful after 14 days. They're more useful, precisely because they're differentiating into the cell types that patients need. Why stop research at 14 days? Once you say we can do this much of it, what's the difference?

One problem that researchers have run into, however, is that differentiation that occurs in vitro don't seem to take to transplanting, while tissues from embryos 'in vivo' (maturing in a living organism) did. Some researchers have found a way to inject human bone marrow stem cells into an immuno-compromised rat embryo and  allow the cells to differentiate there (into, for example, kidney cells by injecting into the embryonic kidney) for transplantation, creating something of an "in vitro organ factory."

 Next the author goes on to lay out reasons why the 14 day rule should be extended to 8 weeks (I debated whether or not to put in a photo, and opted for a drawing. I have serious issues with some of the harmful and non-helpful ways in which graphics are used by certain groups, but ultimately decided it was appropriate here), based on the arbitrary nature of the original rule, sensitivity to pain, neural development, the shift from 'embryo' to 'fetus' status, etc., but really, above all, it's about utility. This allows us to "avoid the moral perils of 'fetus farming'", and still get the scientific progress we crave. The remaining question? What do we do about that pesky but seemingly necessary implantation thing?

Enter Dr. Helen Liu, who has engineered endometrial (womb) tissue that an embryo can nest in while in the petri dish. "You could argue that implantation in a dish is still implantation. But it shatters our moral understanding of the word." So, in the name of health and science, we should grow (like the verbage as we avoid fetus farming? Growing, harvesting...) human fetuses in an artificial womb for up to 8 weeks, kill the (dare I say it) child, and then transplant the tissue in our quest for bliss and immortality. Already there are skin creams on the market that use aborted fetal cells to help us restore our youthful appearance, so we could probably sell the leftover 'parts' for other purposes like that. Good for us, good for the economy, waste not want not.... Yikes!

Don't be scared. We don't have to grow a whole new you... an embryo cloned from one of your cells would need just six or seven weeks to grow many of the tissues you need. We already condone harvesting of cells from cloned human embryos for the first two weeks. Why stop there?

Well, frankly, I am scared.