“Epi-blog”

In what has been a look at an issue that is still under fire and yet to reach the height of debate, I bring these last few weeks and term to a close. This weblog has documented my inquiry into the controversy over human cloning, and we have seen how I, the researchers and the public debate this issue in the public square. As my research developed, my commentary turned toward the inevitable line-drawing and questioning of moral and ethical issues on what constitutes life while drawing upon my understanding of various ways of approaching embryonic research and the possibility of human cloning in the near distant future.

To explain to the reader, my sense of how human cloning will and has played out, I found that a number of experts in the field brought up the question of what constitutes life. In sum, there are two very different radical sides when debating embryonic research which can be crossed (and should be crossed) especially when attempting to draw lines over defining what a “life” is. We either need to protect and preserve all life because life begins at conception, or take the side that embryos do not have the value of persons – even if they are “lives” in a biological sense, they must be sacrificed to help born patients who “really matter.” Peter Singer of Princeton University, hailed by some as the most influential ethicist in the world argued that “if life is not sacred before birth, it is not sacred afterward either.” These lines of justifying cloning research are one of many radical views. However, protecting and preserving life begs us to question when life begins and what values we should place on embryos in creating clones or conducting stem cell research.

To raise one last point that I must mention in parting, one which so often is neglected, is that this type of research has been likened to experiments conducted during the days of the grotesque German experiments of the 1940s, the Nuremberg Code or the Tuskegee syphilis experiments in the 1950s. The polity of the debate and the ethical issues surrounding it turn the Nuremberg Code upside down: The dignity of a human subject will never stop researchers from doing research they think is extremely promising, because the promise of the research justifies defining those subjects out of the community of persons so we can make use of them. Researchers Richard M. Doerflinger, author of The Many Casualties of Cloning, says “beyond politics, the most important lesson of the cloning scandal is moral. Researchers, devoted to increasing human knowledge and bettering the human condition, have long been tempted to “cut corners” on ethics, including the ethics of protecting human research subjects, to achieve their admittedly important goals.” It has been further argued by this reasoning, if respecting a particular kind of human subject would prevent us from pursuing especially promising research; this is sufficient reason for refusing to respect that individual as a person. These are the kinds of attempts at line drawing that deserve attention yet raise the stakes even higher in the debate in what seems an almost impossible task to avoid.

I hope that I have raised some interesting points and that my methods and techniques have been helpful in providing more information. I have tried to provide a look into my own viewpoints as well through this controversy that is still unfolding as we progress into the unknown. Primarily, I hope that I have demonstrated that while no argument can be drawn in black and white, certainly we can find a middle ground as we come to terms with the argument in a manner that is ethical and ideological.