Vatican Denounces Embryonic Stem Cell Research and Fertilisation Treatments

Wednesday last week Declan was diagnosed with a viral infection in the Royal London Hospital and is only now starting to recover. He got it while we were snoozing in the doorway of an unused building as we waited for 1.00am to bed down in our sleeping pitch – since 7 September we have been sleeping tucked away, about twenty paces from the side entrance of a building, down some twelve steps; prior to that we slept for almost two years in a porch. The previous blog gives a brief account of some of the events of late, so I won’t repeat myself. Of course we are still being told, pretty much every working night now, to stay away until 1.00am due to there being a “function” (we get up at 4.20am M-F; 6.20am on weekends), and on Monday we were again hosed out of the pitch. The company that owns the building is a Livery Company – a self-contained society with a strong commitment to charitable causes; it also plays an important part in the system of local government in the City of London, reflecting its historical roots (see www.heraldicmedia.com). In fact, communications started out cordial between us and employees: the company not only fund raises for science education (Declan’s petition to the UN on research cloning of embryos and stem cells has been signed by 587 scientists and academics, including 24 Nobel Laureates, despite months of serious spamming), but run a project for the homeless.

Press conference on bioethics at the Vatican on Friday

In its most authoritative declaration on bioethics for more than 20 years, the Vatican on Friday reinforced its hostility to a wide range of techniques and treatments that have become available in recent decades, said The Guardian. They included IVF, embryonic stem cell research, the morning-after pill and the contraceptive drug mifepristone. The 36-page document endorsed by Pope Benedict XVI also condemns the creation of hybrid human-animal embryos – demanded by researchers looking to cure diseases because of a shortage of human eggs – which is now legal in the UK thanks to the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act 2008.

The document stopped short of declaring that human embryos were people, according to The Guardian. The pope’s chief adviser on bioethical issues, Monsignor Rino Fisichella, told a press conference that such a declaration would have embroiled the Vatican in a “very complex philosophical debate”. But, he said, the document fully backed the idea that a human embryo had the “dignity typical of a person”. And he noted this was an “advance” on the position taken in the Vatican’s last high-level pronouncement, its 1987 instruction entitled Donum Vitae (The Gift of Life).

The formulation in its latest document, Dignitas Personae (The Dignity of the Person) comes close to equating with murder such practices as the destruction of defective embryos in IVF, said The Guardian. On one issue – what to do with frozen, “orphan” embryos – the Vatican admitted it was flummoxed. Dignitas Personae rules out every apparent solution: their destruction, their donation to infertile couples and their use for therapeutic or experimental purposes. It said that proposals for the adoption of unwanted embryos were “praiseworthy in intention”, but fraught with problems.

Fisichella’s predecessor as president of the Pontifical Pro-life Academy, Monsignor Elio Sgreccia, said: “Our basic advice is that the freezing [of the embryos] ought not to be done.” It created “a blind alley”; a situation “the correction of which implies another mistake”. Neither he nor any of the other Vatican officials at the presentation would venture an opinion on what they considered the lesser evil.

According to The Guardian, the document otherwise restates the Catholic church’s opposition to abortifacient forms of contraception, or those it regards as such. These include the world’s most widely used method of reversible contraception, the intrauterine device (IUD) or coil. Dignitas Personae said most forms of artificial fertilisation were “to be excluded” on the grounds that they replaced “the conjugal act” as a means of reproduction. And it said pre-implantation diagnosis during IVF, in which embryos are examined for defects or to determine gender or other characteristics, was “shameful and utterly reprehensible”.

Saying life was sacred from the moment of conception to the moment of natural death, the document also defended the Catholic church’s right to intervene on such matters. It accepted, however, that Catholic parents, especially in the US, might have no alternative to having their children inoculated with vaccines produced with cells from aborted foetuses. It also stressed that stem cell research “should be encouraged” if the tissue is obtained from adults, umbilical cord blood or foetuses that have died naturally (Hooper, The Guardian, 13/12).

Thomas Murray of the Hastings Center told the Washington Post
that the guide “is significant in the sense that the church has now laid down a marker on these important issues … The church has now dug in and committed itself to an official position.”

The document has drawn criticism from many groups, said the Washington Post. “The Vatican’s statement on bioethics shows that it is once again on the wrong side of science and the needs of contemporary society,” said Jon O’Brien, president of Catholics for Choice. Infertility doctors and stem cell researchers defended their efforts. “It has contributed to the quality of life of patients and families through the improved ability to have children, which clearly is a worthwhile goal and a focus of many couples in their life goals,” said Robert Brzyski of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine. Said George Daley of the International Society for Stem Cell Research: “Cells are not people and embryos are not people, and my first responsibility as a physician is to patients – not cells in a petri dish.”

Steven Pinker, world-renowned thinker and Johnstone Family Professor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University (and an honorary associate of NAC and early signatory of Declan’s petition to the UN on therapeutic cloning), argues in a piece in The New Republic titled “The Stupidity of Dignity” (posted 28 May) that the concept of dignity is natural ground on which to build an obstructionist bioethics. “An alleged breach of dignity provides a way for third parties to pass judgment on actions that are knowingly and willingly chosen by the affected individuals,” he writes. “It thus offers a moralistic justification for expanded government regulation of science, medicine, and private life. And the Church’s franchise to guide people in the most profound events of their lives – birth, death, and reproduction – is in danger of being undermined when biomedicine scrambles the rules. It’s not surprising, then, that ‘dignity’ is a recurring theme in Catholic doctrine: The word appears more than 100 times in the 1997 edition of the Catechism and is a leitmotif in the Vatican’s recent pronouncements on biomedicine” (see blog of 23 May “The Stupidity of Dignity”).

Stem cell research tops Obama agenda

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 Monday I sent 198 emails - mainly to Scotland and California because in Sunday’s blog I referred to the MRC Centre for Regenerative Medicine of Edinburgh University and the Sanford Consortium for Regenerative Medicine in San Diego – but only received ten out-of-office autoreplies, and not unsurprisingly just one signature. Yesterday I sent 128 emails, mainly to California, which yielded two autoreplies, and no signatures.

Also yesterday, The Big Issue Head Office – The Big Issue is a magazine sold by homeless people throughout the UK on registered street pitches – advised Declan that our pitches are in effect terminated (as soon as it has been confirmed by Office staff that we did not purchase a minimum of 40 magazines each week for the four weeks commenced 6 October, we will no longer be able to have a registered pitch), despite his complaint the previous day to the chair of The Big Issue Foundation (see previous blog). This is an extremely serious situation for me in particular, in that I am facing possible prosecution for begging.

Then last night, as we were bedding down, just to add insult to injury, I suppose, two guys entertained themselves on their skateboards above us for some twenty minutes – since 7 September we have been sleeping tucked away, about twenty paces from the side entrance of a building, down some twelve steps (prior to that we slept for almost two years in a porch). The last time some guys partied in the enclosure, on 9 September, we decided to sleep somewhere else the following night and I was arrested because I refused to be moved on as result of having nowhere else to sleep (see blog of 11 September “I am arrested for breach of the peace”). The road is described as a “quiet thoroughfare” by the company that owns the building. Oh, well.



Barely a week since his election victory, US President-elect Barack Obama is bringing joy to long-suffering stem cell researchers. For years, US progress has been crippled by restrictions introduced in August 2001 by President George W Bush, preventing federally funded researchers from working on all but a few sources of embryonic stem cells - the cells from embryos with huge medical potential for repairing organs and tissues. Now, those restrictions will be among the first of Bush’s executive orders to be swept away, probably within the next 100 days, said New Scientist. The news emerged on Sunday from an interview on Fox News featuring John Podesta, the head of Obama’s “transition team”, which is managing the switch to power.

“There’s a lot that the president can do using his executive authority without waiting for congressional action, and I think we’ll see the president do that,” said Podesta, a former chief of staff to President Bill Clinton. According to New Scientist, the aim is to quickly dismantle the legacies of the Bush era that Obama sees as holding back progress, particularly those motivated by ideology or religion. Bush’s resistance to stem cell research, for example, is a concession to evangelical conservatives who oppose all research on embryos. “I think across the board, on stem cell research, on a number of areas, you see the Bush administration even today moving aggressively to do things that I think are probably not in the interest of the country,” said Podesta.

The news was greeted with delight by researchers who have long criticised the Bush restrictions. “Hallelujah - at last,” Robert Lanza, chief scientist at Advanced Cell Technology in Massachusetts (and a signatory of Declan’s petition), told New Scientist. He added: “This represents the end of a sad chapter in American scientific history. Under an Obama administration, money will hopefully flow to all promising avenues of research based on scientific merit, and not skewed to fit a conservative agenda. We’ve been operating for the past decade with one hand tied behind our back” (Coghlan, New Scientist, 12/11).

The Union-Tribune quotes Joe Panetta, executive director of San Diego’s Biocom, an association representing the local biotech industry. “I’m feeling very positive about some of the things we’ve seen and heard about Obama’s plans to increase funding for basic research,” Panetta said. He added that a number of local biotech firms depend on federal funds for research, largely distributed through the National Institutes of Health. Federal support of stem cell research would also aid the Burnham, Scripps and Salk research institutes (of the Sanford Consortium for Regenerative Medicine). Although California has enacted its own $3 billion stem cell research program, under current federal regulations, embryonic research must be conducted separately from federally funded research. “That’s an incredible nightmare in logistics and operations,” Panetta said. “It would be great to see the rules loosening” (Calbreath, The Union-Tribune, 9/11).

According to Reuters, a reversal of President Bush’s long-standing policy would give a boost to companies seeking to develop therapies based on stem cell research. Several stem cell focused companies reported positive developments on Monday. Geron Corp said its potential HIV treatment, TAT2, had promising preclinical data, while biotech giant Celgene Corp got a regulatory nod to go ahead with human trials of its experimental stem cell therapy for the treatment of Crohn’s disease. “We will see more and more of these events just given the fact that there is more and more path for the commercialisation of stem cells – adult, placental, umbilical and now, more embryonic,” WBB Securities analyst Steve Brozak said. Shares of Geron were up as much as 16 percent, while StemCells’ shares soared 42 percent. Both stocks have risen significantly over the last one month. Other smaller players in the field also benefited (Dey, Reuters, 10/11).

Cardinal Javier Lozano Barragan of Mexico, who acts as the Vatican health minister, said that stem cells taken from human embryos and involving the destruction of the embryos “serve no purpose”, reports The Times yesterday under the headline “Vatican fires off warning to Barack Obama over stem cell research”. Asked whether the Vatican was concerned about reports that Mr Obama might reverse the Bush Administration’s ban, the cardinal said that embryonic stem cell research had not resulted in any significant health cure so far and was “good for nothing”. Research on adult stem cells and umbilical cords had been shown to have “positive value”, by contrast, although even that was not “a panacea for everything”. He said the Vatican would seek clarification of the new administration’s position on stem cells, and he himself was not “fully aware” what it was (Owen, The Times, 11/11).

Our campaign in support of embryonic stem cell research and therapeutic cloning, also known as somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT), will argue that stem cell research, including human embryonic stem (hES) cell research, is vital to advancing regenerative medicine. According to a 2006 US Department of Health & Human Services report, a conservative estimate of the worldwide market for regenerative medicine by 2010 is $500 billion (the projected US market is $100 billion). We will also argue that advancements in hES cell research have the potential to be an economic boon for countries throughout the world and to lower overall domestic health care costs, which in the US alone are in excess of $2 trillion annually (16 percent of US Gross Domestic Product). With reference to the United States, we will further argue that ill-considered interventions at a state level that replace rational regulation with restrictions based on ideology undercut a peer-governed competitive national system for funding biomedical research that has been a fundamental policy and programmatic triumph for the United States (see blog of 3 November “State Stem Cell Policies Deserve National Attention”).

In fact, we believe that NAC will be in a position to be a leading Vatican watchdog regarding ES cell research and SCNT. We are well aware of the Commission of the Bishops’ Conferences of the European Community (COMECE), for example, which has a permanent Secretariat in Brussels. The COMECE secretariat monitors and analyses current developments in research policy, biotechnology and bioethics at the European Union level, according to its website.

The porch we sleep in is being targeted

A few days ago Declan received a letter from the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg confirming that his case file has been opened, and requesting his application within six months from 1 June. Since he received the letter, the harrying and harassment have mounted quite alarmingly.

The porch we sleep in has been particularly targeted. For the last few days the floor has been covered with all kind of things: ice cream, coffee, a sticky black liquid, etc. Declan thinks it is because one of these nights either a cleaner is going to tell us to go away because the mess has to be mopped up (last night at 11.30pm a guy entered the office building by the porch, blowing the porch alarm on his way out a few minutes later) or we are going to be told the mess has been done by us and we need to move out for good. So, this morning we bought some products of our own to do the cleaning.

We were interested to learn that the new coroner for the inquest into the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, is Lord Justice Scott Baker – Declan’s application to the Court of Appeal for leave to appeal was rejected by Lord/Lady Justice Scott Baker on the papers on 22 March 2007, and an order made that he may not request the decision to reconsidered at a hearing. Yesterday the Daily Express ran a headline on its front page which read: “New coroner wants to keep evidence secret.” A safe pair of hands.

Meanwhile the Vatican’s residents have found something new to obstruct. Cardinal Renato Martino, a Vatican cardinal, has said Catholics should stop donating money to Amnesty International because it said in April that women should have access to abortion services in cases of rape, incest or when pregnancy is a risk to the mother. Who’s next – Greenpeace?