 Value of Life Discussed at Genetics Colloquium
Describing a critical struggle to define a new era in powerful medical technology, speakers at a colloquium on genetics and cloning said the Catholic Church must remain steadfast in its defense of all life.
“It’s hard to overestimate the drama of this,” said William B. Hurlbut, M.D., a consulting professor in biology at Stanford University and an appointee to President George W. Bush’s Council on Bioethics.
Hurlbut described the steady advancement of technologies using DNA identification that could produce powerful gene-related medicines, and the opportunities in cloning that could grow test-tube fetuses used for tissues and organs identically matched to a patient's DNA. Cloning—using a fetus produced from an egg injected with a patient’s DNA—is also the means for stem-cells, the hotly debated prototype material which could theoretically be injected and assimilate as new cells of any type in the body. Although most of these treatments are still in development, they will be part of a new era in disease control and possibly elimination, Hurlbut said.
The problem, said Hurlbut and other speakers, is how to curb and restrain the biotech industry from growing and harvesting embryos without regard for the lives they use and destroy.
“Cloning is power over another being, it is manufacture without consent,” said Reverend Monsignor Jeremiah J. McCarthy, a moral theologist who has written about medical ethics. “Let this be a test: Would cloning be a loving act? Not for the cloner but for the cloned?”
Cloning, with its shadowy possibilities of a resurgence in eugenics and evolutionary control, must not be used to create “different classes of people,” McCarthy said.
Government intervention and supervision of these technologies cannot be counted on, warned U.S. Representative Dennis J. Kucinich, a Democrat from Ohio, and the colloquium’s third speaker. He described the government’s lagging response to genetically modified (GMO) food, which was poorly understood and regulated until relatively recently, when GMO crops had already gained near dominance in United States’ agriculture.
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