LUCKY SEVERSON: It's a familiar scene in Wenhem, Massachusetts: The Reverend Ann Abernethy, walking beside her husband, the Reverend William Abernethy, to the church where she is the pastor. Both are United Church of Christ pastors. He has suffered from Parkinson's disease for 20 years.
Reverend WILLIAM ABERNETHY: It makes me furious to have that disease; to wake up in the morning and find yourself shaking so that you can't do what you want to do; to find yourself adjusting to a new inability to work and walk and talk and laugh.
SEVERSON: He says he will try anything that offers hope. He's had two brain operations, which have worked for some patients, but not for him. Now he is holding onto the hope offered by therapeutic cloning. And in Reverend Abernethy's view, it is research that has God's blessing.
Rev. ABERNETHY: To have a possibility to make human life better and not
use it is as much sin as anything I can think of. Denying what God has made
available to us, the abundant life Christ promises, is transgressing what God has
called us to be.SEVERSON: For all its mystery, therapeutic cloning is not a scientifically complicated process, at least in its initial stage. Researchers remove the nucleus of a woman's egg and replace it with a cell from the patient. The egg is then placed in a Petri dish and the cell in it is stimulated to divide for five days. It's these cloned embryonic stem cells that have the potential, scientists believe, to cure a variety of diseases such as Parkinson's and Alzheimer's and other illnesses. The cells would be implanted without the patient's body rejecting them.
So the embryo is first created and then destroyed to obtain the needed stem cells, and that worries Leon Kass. He's chairman of the President's Council on Bioethics.
Dr. LEON KASS (Biologist and Chair, President's Council on Bioethics):
Judaism, which is my religion, does not believe that this is a human being, but
as a biologist, I've come to somehow regard the earliest stages of human life as
not humanly nothing. It's something, and if nothing obstructs its unfolding
itself [it can] become something like you and me, if all goes well.SEVERSON: And Leon Kass is not alone. Theology professor Gilbert Meilaender at Valparaiso University is on the President's Council. He believes the tiny cloned embryo is a human life and deserves protection.
Professor GILBERT MEILAENDER (Theology Department, Valparaiso University): The simple fact that someone is little and undeveloped at this point doesn't mean that they somehow lack equality and dignity with someone who is big and strong and smart.
SEVERSON: Many, if not most scientists take a different point of view. Dr. George Daley is a stem cell expert with the Whitehead Institute at MIT.
Dr. GEORGE DALEY (Whitehead Institute, MIT): We are talking about embryos
that are smaller than the period at the end of a sentence -- the cells that exist
as individual elements in the Petri dish. Cells that I can extract from your skin
and place in a Petri dish and reactivate. I don't think those are beings.SEVERSON: Meilaender the theologian compares the vulnerability of an embryo to that of Christ on the cross. He believes those among us who are suffering, such as Reverend Abernethy, deserve help, but not if the moral cost is too high.
Prof. MEILAENDER: Suffering is a terrible thing and we must relieve it as much as we can, but who would want to live in a society which thought that the relief of suffering was the highest good, and that one ought never accept suffering in order to achieve some other goal? I wouldn't think that would be a very noble society at all.
Rev. ANN ABERNETHY (First Church in Wenham): Is that not the higher good, that we need to take the lives that we are kind of committed to care for and to do the best we can to provide quality of life for them, as opposed to putting our weight on the lives that aren't viable yet?
President GEORGE W. BUSH: Anything other than a total ban on human cloning
would be unethical. Research cloning would contradict the most fundamental
principle of medical ethics: that no human life should be exploited or
extinguished for the benefit of another.
Dr. DALEY: Well, obviously if there's a criminalization of research on
these very, very early stages of human embryos or on the use of nuclear transfer,
cloning to create these human embryos, this very promising new area of
biomedicine will not go forward in the U.S.
Prof. MEILEANDER: I think it would diminish us. It would suggest a kind of
crassness, a willingness to use nascent human life simply as a resource for our
purposes.
Rev. WILLIAM ABERNETHY: What I found myself saying, in spite of myself,
was, "God, if you could heal me, why didn't you?" And that anger was very
difficult for me to deal with for several months. For the most part that is
lifted. It's almost as though God would say things to me which made sense
rationally, but he said it in a tone of voice that was immensely compassionate.
And that's been very important to me, that kind of experience. It makes me feel
deeply a part of God's love. So whatever happens in the next few years -- stem
cells or whatever -- I will celebrate it, I hope.
