Can a cell have a soul?
The vast majority of emails I send to scientists and academics inviting them to sign Declan’s petition to the UN on research cloning of embryos and stem cells are still being dumped to spam boxes (or to cyberspace, see blog of 4 September “Obama: Yes to stem cells, funding”). On Thursday, I only got 14 out-of-office autoreplies from 226 emails: 36 emails to the Department of Zoology at Cambridge University yielded zero autoreplies; 45 to the University's Neurology Unit, just one. Since Monday I have sent 628 emails which have resulted in five signatures; last week it was one signature from 1,072 emails (see blog of 26 October “British lawmakers back human-animal embryo research”). I would actually be surprised if more than 5 percent of my emails this week went to inboxes – the petition has so far been signed by 571 scientists and academics, including 24 Nobel Laureates.
This week temperatures plummeted – the first time London has seen snow in October for 70 years. Nonetheless, Declan continues to wash in the street, which he has been doing since 10 April as a result of all the harassment he has received from other homeless: see, for example, blog of 18 June “Declan robbed in the Sisters of Mercy Dellow Centre”; or blog of 19 June “Declan assaulted in the Manna Centre”; or blog of 16 May “More racially aggravated harassment in the Dellow Centre”. Oh, and on 18 June 2007 we were barred from the Methodist Church Whitechapel Mission by the minister’s wife due to concerns about our safety, after I was assaulted in an unprovoked attack by a homeless woman in the canteen (see here). Declan has written on several occasions to the head of the Catholic Church in England and Wales, Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, in his capacity as Archbishop of the Diocese of Westminster, to which the Dellow Centre belongs (see blog of 4 July “Second Request for Priority to the European Court”).
Yesterday the Catholic News Agency reported that the Bishop of Lansing Earl Boyea rebuked Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm’s Sunday endorsement of Proposal 2, the 4 November ballot proposal that would loosen restrictions on embryonic stem cell research in Michigan (see, for example, blog of 17 October “Stem Cell Research: Five Basic Things To Know”). Speaking at a political rally in Grand Rapids, Michigan, Granholm said: “As a Catholic, I can say to be pro-cure is to be pro-life.” In a Monday statement Bishop Boyea responded to the governor’s comments. He described as “shocking” her mention of her Catholic faith to justify her endorsement. “While the Catholic Church strongly supports legitimate forms of stem cell research and all other proper forms of scientific inquiry, the Church also teaches that is it is always immoral to destroy a human embryo,” he wrote. “For that reason, the Catholic Bishops of Michigan have taken a strong position in opposition to this well-funded assault on human life.”
Writing recently for the British Medical Journal, Professor John Burn, Medical Director and Head of the Institute of Human Genetics at Newcastle University (and a signatory of Declan’s petition) asks at what point a cell becomes a human. “The Catholic church has made its position absolutely clear,” he writes. “Life begins at conception, and any deliberate generation of embryonic stem cells – or, to some, generation of embryos without the intention of implanting them into a woman – is tantamount to murder.” Like some of his predecessors, Pope Benedict XVI has declared that “ensoulment” might occur at conception. But, Burn argues, if souls are delivered, it is difficult to see how this could occur before 14 days. It is only then that the primitive streak forms, and a single embryo could be said to exist. Before this, the cells that make up the embryo could result in up to five identical embryos.
Burn concludes: “Just as protests about cadaver organ donation were addressed rationally and led to the widespread acceptance that the definition of death could no longer depend on biblical interpretation, so medical need dictates that the origin of human individuality must be defined with similar pragmatic precision. A cell cannot have a soul”.
In an interview with Discover Magazine, published in 2002, Lord Robert May of Oxford, then head of the Royal Society of London and former chief scientific advisor to the British government, spoke of misconceptions around the stem-cell debate. “Most people think that the heart of the debate is whether the soul enters the embryo at conception,” he said. “Up until 130 years ago, the official position of the Catholic Church – this is not my position, but something the bishop of Oxford drew to the attention of the House of Lords – was that the soul entered the embryo on the 40th day after conception if it was male and the 80th day after conception if it was female. That derives originally from Thomas Aquinas. It was changed in 1869 to say the soul enters the embryo on the day of conception, the same for men and women.
“So at the heart of this debate is not some absolutely fundamental tenet at the heart of Christianity. Adopt Thomas Aquinas’s original position and there would be no problem today. Research in the UK is only on embryos up to 14 days old. So Thomas Aquinas would be perfectly happy with it. There is no ethical issue.” (Burn points out that the 40 day ruling – still used in Jewish and Islamic teaching – dates back to Aristotle, who concluded that man receives his soul after 40 days and woman hers after 80 days.)
Professor Lisa Jardine, the chair of the British British Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority, told the New Statesman in May that the moment of fertilisation is not a very helpful moment to begin talking about the sanctity of human life. “As a woman who’s had a long childbearing life, I know perfectly well that any number of embryos were swept away. Maybe [some] naturally, but some of them weren’t. Sometimes I’d jumped up and down in the hope that I wasn’t pregnant, you know?” In the same issue of the New Statesman is philosopher Julian Baggini on deciding ethical issues. “The world’s major religious texts have nothing to say about stem cells, not least because those words do not appear in any of them,” he writes, adding: “It may be a matter of faith that Christ rose from the dead, but Christians have to defend anything they say about the first stages of life.”
As I explained in the blog of 26 October “British lawmakers back human-animal embryo research”, our campaign in support of embryonic stem cell research and therapeutic cloning, also known as somatic-cell nuclear transfer (SCNT), has been greatly simplified. Gone now are the sections I had planned – “Science and Religion”, “Science and the Law” and “Religion in Public Life” – mainly because Declan was right all along: they distract from the campaign. Greenpeace International and Greenpeace UK are still our main models. Like Greenpeace UK, we will include in the homepage menu “Blog”, “About NAC”, “What we do” and “Media centre”. (This is not wishful thinking on my part: the NAC website, which was suspended on 8 March, was loosely based on Greenpeace International; and, in fact, by the time we were made homeless I had uploaded hundreds of articles and photographs on public policy reforms strongly rejected by the Vatican and the Christian right. We also featured books, and had three original campaigns – one of which was titled “The Vatican and the achievement of the UN Millennium Development Goals”, incorporating as a “Take action” an email to Pope Benedict XVI urging him to stop obstructing family planning.)
What for Greenpeace UK is the subsection “Climate change” – after you click “What we do” – for us will be “Embryonic stem cell research” and will include the following associated subsections: “Science”, “Law and Policy”, “Ethics” and “Applications”. And, as in the Greenpeace International website, each of these associated subsections will be further subdivided: under “Ethics”, for example, we will propagate the view of some of the world’s leading figures in bioethics that, for example, there is no ethical issue with research on embryos up to 14 days old, and that there should be a relaxation of rules restricting the compensation of egg donors to boost the supply of human eggs needed for SCNT (see blog of 16 July “Therapeutic cloning: Researchers back bid to pay egg donor”).
The campaign will argue that stem cell research, including human embryonic stem (hES) cell research, is not only vital to advancing regenerative medicine, but has the potential to be an economic boon for countries and to lower overall domestic health care costs. We will also have a “Take action”, feature books, and publish, for example, all the various letters that have been signed by Nobel Laureates in support of SCNT. We won’t be announcing Declan’s petition to the UN in this website since we believe it’s best if scientists and academics sign first. What interested person would say no to a petition that has been signed by a large number of top scientists and academics from around the world, including several Nobel Laureates?
