A new way to make mice!
News from China this week: Qi Zhou of the Institute of Zoology in Beijing and Fanyi Zeng of Shanghai Jiao Tong University used iPS (induced pluripotent stem) cells to grow entire healthy mice, proving definitively that cells from adult tissues can be “reprogrammed” to develop into any tissue in the body. (A news report can be found at: http://www.nature.com/news/2009/090723/full/460560a.html.)
Thus stem cells without destruction of embryos is possible.
Or is it? An interesting philosophical puzzle arises when we try to figure out how to ascribe personhood (mousehood? Muritas?), which is a yes-or-no question, to the complex developmental processes of embryonic life. In current Catholic teaching, personhood is imputed to human embryos from conception, which is straightforward enough. Here an an iPS cell was inserted into a crippled embryo, whereupon it took over the cellular machinery, and then was brought to term. (Of course before studies like this could pass Catholic muster for humans, this would need to be done without the damaged embryo, maybe in eggs. That may well be a simple technological hurdle.) Perhaps, in time, scientists can figure out how to go partway back–so a cell “thinks” it is fetal liver, for example, and would produce only that tissue, not a whole person. But by definition, an iPS cell is capable of producing ANY tissue (except extra-fetal stuff like placenta,) therefore it is capable of producing EVERY tissue, as the Chinese study proves. So…a few questions concerning possible human application of this technology:
1. Should iPS cells be protected in Catholic teaching as persons (therefore subjects of rights, including the right to life,) because they are pluripotent, or are they fair game for research and therapy, like other tissues? Human iPS cells have been around since 2007.
2. Or do they “become” persons when placed in an environment in which they can manifest their complete potential? If so, why wouldn’t the same be true for ordinary embryos–that they’re persons only when in a conducive environment like someone’s uterus? But then what about personhood at conception?
3. If regular embryos are different because they are totipotent (they can grow everything themselves, including placenta,) then does our personhood inhere principally in our ability to grow our own placentas? But no adult can do that anymore–only embryos grow their own. Surely we don’t lose our personhood with our placentas!
These are indeed interesting times.
Let the hair splitting begin!
I am not a moral theologian, and don’t like to split hairs as an amateur either. However, I would expect that when moral theologians address these questions that you have raised they will not describe iPS cells as persons, but they will not treat them as medical waste either. The dignity of the human person is the foundation of the moral judgement about the personhood of the fetus. Rights, as important as they are, arise from the dignity of the human person and the corresponding obligations of other moral agents. I think I read that somewhere recently. :-) As such, while iPS cells might not be persons in Catholic moral teaching, they are to be treated with a reverence similar to that of the body of a person after death, or of a severed limb. I would think that research with human iPS cells would not be problematic as long as there is no attempt to form a fetus or inject them into an existing fetus.
Steve —
I would start splititng hairs quite yet :-) I would like to just point out for starters what the two basic issues in the stem cell debates seem to be::
1. what is a human person?
2. how do you tell one when you find one?
This thread is particularly about the latter, I think, but I don’t think there is a snowball’s chance in hell of solving the second unless the first is answered adequately. So I predict that some of the confusion here will center around tat question. I also predict that there will be a recurrent semantic problem involving the meaning(s) of “person”, “human life”,”human being”.
I suggest that we constantly use “person” to refer to that which has a moral right to life as do “born-persons”. Let’s stipulate “human life” as a broader term to include “person” and any other life
One other comment — I don’t think this question will be settled to the Churhc’s satisfaction until the moral theologians in the scholastic tradition (which most natural law philosophers are. as I see it), revise Aristotle’s theory of “matter” and what he called “signed matter”. No, I won’t burden you with those problems. (Talk about hair-splitting!) i’ll just say that in my opinion the reality of genes consigns a lot of Aristotle’s theory (NOT all of it) to the dustbin.
So we need a more accurate theory of what a “material substance is, specifically a clearer idea of what a “human material substance” is, that is, a clearer idea of what a “human person” is.. But I fear we’ll have to wait for the new Aquinas for that one. So expect a lot more wrangling. Triple sigh.
The experiments with the mouse cells are types of cloning. Dignitas Personae has a section on cloning as it relates to human beings. I think DP’s condemnation of such reproductive science is correct. From para. 29 of the document:
“If cloning were to be done for reproduction, this would impose on the resulting
individual a predetermined genetic identity, subjecting him – as has been stated – to a form of biological slavery, from which it would be difficult to free himself. The fact that someone
would arrogate to himself the right to determine arbitrarily the genetic characteristics of another person represents a grave offense to the dignity of that person as well as to the fundamental equality of all people.
The originality of every person is a consequence of the particular relationship that exists
between God and a human being from the first moment of his existence and carries with it the
obligation to respect the singularity and integrity of each person, even on the biological and
genetic levels.”
Ooops — that should have been:
Let’s use “human life” as a broader term to include
1/ “human person”
1. any life-form in the process of human gestation that seems to have *some* but not all theessential characteristics of a human persona”
See how we get back to the problem of “what is a human person”? You can’t adequately talk about oe unless you know what its essential characteristics are. If you don’t know what its essential characteristics are, you won’t be able to tell one when you find one by looking at its characteristics.
At first I thought the title was “A new way to make NICE” and was looking for proposed guidelines to turn curmudgeons into plowshares.
Oh, well, back to jammies and milk.
To all esp. Ms. Fulham – not sure that DP states that there is a human “person” from the moment of conception. DP talks about human “life” from conception but never specifically calls that a “person”…..but I stand to be corrected?
Would completely agree with Ann’s comments about natural law; how you explain and interpret that; and the fact that we are now in a scientific era that may well go beyond the “scholastic” definitions of natural law.
Bill D,
Dignitas personae seems to say both that Donum vitae was correct that we cannot discern personhood in an embryo and yet that there’s no way not to. Here’s one relevant passage: “If Donum vitae, in order to avoid a statement of an explicitly philosophical nature, did not define the embryo as a person, it nonetheless did indicate that there is an intrinsic connection between the ontological dimension and the specific value of every human life. Although the presence of the spiritual soul cannot be observed experimentally, the conclusions of science regarding the human embryo give “a valuable indication for discerning by the use of reason a personal presence at the moment of the first appearance of a human life: how could a human individual not be a human person?”….. The human embryo has, therefore, from the very beginning, the dignity proper to a person.”
But only persons have the dignity of persons, yes? With other tissues we might speak of a degree of respect due to them, but no where near as absolutely as it’s put here.
William,
Yes, this turned out to be cloning, since they grew the embryos up into whole mice. There’s strong consensus that cloning is bad. But it’s only cloning if you make a person, not if you make tissue.
Ann,
Yes indeed–I think the combination of the irresolvable circularity you note with the all-but-definition of DP (not to mention the lightning-rod character of this question politically in the US Church,) combine to make iPS’s a pretty nifty test case. We have to have a definition of person in order to decide about iPS. But we don’t have language or even categories to decide about such things, it seems to me. Fun stuff!
Ok, here goes. The problem with attempts to ascribe personhood to certain individuals in a set of human organisms by an appeal to certain conditions, either necessary or sufficient, is that they always smack of arbitrariness- and arbitrariness is the natural enemy of normativity. If someone tells me that it is ok to kill one human but not another and that this is because one has green eyes and the other blue, I will take this person to be either confused or degenerate. The best way to get around such arbitrariness is to renounce any attempts to differentiate between human organisms and human persons. That is, the two terms should be intensionally (and thus, of course, extensionally) equivalent. Put another way, what is constitutive of being human ought to be constitutive of being a person. And what is constitutive of being a human organism? My best guess would be the following: something is a human organism if it possesses human DNA and has the innate and active dispositional capacity to develop into a completely developed member of that species. Cells which are human and totipotent (such as a zygote) fall under this definition. Teritomas (disorganized masses of pluripotent cells) would not be human organisms since they lack the requisite developmental directedness. I think the objection regarding the capacity for placenta formation being constitutive of personhood relies on an overly restrictive definition of totipotency, defining the latter in terms of the range of cells it can produce while paying insufficient attention to its capacity to form a complete organism, rather than a chaotic mass of various body tissues.
Whoops, I got a little ahead of myself. With regard to the second objection, I do not think that implanting the iPS cells into a crippled embryo can correctly be characterized as ‘putting them in an environment in which they can manifest their complete potential’. Or at least we need to clarify what we mean by ‘potential’. Batteries have, in some attenuated sense, the potential to light my way through a darkened forest, but only as a constituent (though an essential one) of the larger system known as my flashlight. That is, we only speak of it having this potential insofar as it is a component in a larger whole. We also speak of particular things having an intrinsic potential, which is a more proper sense of ‘potential’. For example, the potential of a campfire to keep me warm in the dark forest- even if the necessary conditions for the continued existence of that thing are factors extrinsic to the thing itself (such as wood for the fire and my willingness to collect said wood). I think we use the former sense of ‘potential’ when referring to iPS cells’ potential to develop into a complete organism and the latter sense when referring to an embryo’s potential to develop into an human infant- such development in the latter case relying on factors extrinsic to the embryo itself.
In the last post, I would rather say “…when referring to iPS cells potential in contributing to the development of a complete organism…”
There is a reduction ad absurdum here. In spades. Lisa poses some fascinating possibilities and in our 24/7 ones issue obsession it may be necessary. Yet is it not gnawing (I know I’ve written it often) that zygotes get so much more scrutiny than sex trafficking of women, hunger in Haiti, infantile health care in the Third World…..??
These are extremely challenging issues and we are doing such a poor job in helping born humans live well. We challenge our government where we know we will not be jailed but do not challenge the countless leaders who prevent basic needs to a most needy population. This is most surely where the questions of Matt: 25:36-42 will be asked by the returning Christ.
But I understand. Back to matter and form.
That is what I recall – so, it really comes down to interpretation. As others have said on prior posts, you have science and you have theology. They reflect different points of view.
Thanks, Ms. Fullam. Again, if I look at moral theologians (esp. those not in favor at this time), natural law and its application to issues such as abortion needs to reflect modern science, modern pyschology, etc. and move away from the manual approach.
“But it’s only cloning if you make a person, not if you make tissue.”
Lisa–
I’m not an expert on cloning, but I don’t think the Church would agree that cloning is limited to reproductive cloning. In fact, DP states that therapeutic cloning is a greater moral wrong than reproductive cloning is:
“From the ethical point of view, so-called therapeutic cloning is even more serious [than reproductive cloning]. To create embryos with the intention of destroying them, even with the intention of helping the sick, is completely incompatible with human dignity, because it makes the existence of a human being at the embryonic stage nothing more than a means to be used and destroyed. It is gravely immoral to sacrifice a human life for therapeutic ends.”
Lisa —
It seems to me that the stem cell debate is allowed to be settled on the basis of simply builogical data, then there is no chance of finding out whether the stem cells of any sort or persons or not. The reason is that human persons are defined by the kind of mental acts they can perform, and biological data can form only an *indication* that any sort of mental operations are occorring. The input of the psychologist and related neuroscience is therefore crucial in determining what those tiny cells are or aren’t.
if it is argued that one cell cannot give evidence of any sort of mental operations I would agree — no specifically brain cells, then no specifically humna person is present. This is essentially one of the medieval argumetns againsts the “ensoulment” of the tiny creatures. Unfortunately, Rome doesn’t pay attention to the medieval *arguments*. It only uses the vocabulary of the Aristotelian-Thomist language game (substance, potsould, potential, act, etc.), and in my opinion uses it very sloppily
Further, the whole argument about consciousness is dependint on establishing whether or not at any given time the creature “is” conscious, and we’re back to the problem of the development of brain cells.
Add to that the lameness of philosophers generally about the meaning of “consciousness”. It is both a semantic and ontological problem, I think. What did it mean in its first use? I tried to tract that down at one time but was unable to discover when the term first in any technical sense in philosophy. Maybe Locke. (I gave up trying to find it.) At any rate, since the term had so many meanings *previous{ to the philosophical uses it isn’t surprising that the philosoph of consciosness is articularly muddy to this day.
If anybody want a very competent considerations of the reality of consciousness as distint from it’s content or the brain, I think you can’t do better than G. E. Moore’s article on the meaning of “consciousness of a patch of blue”. He does a greta job of distinguishing the meanings of “consciousness of” and “a patch of blue”. Moore, teacher of both Russell and Wittgenstei (and and a reader of Husserl, the phenomenologist) t is the real founder of ordinary language philosophy at Cambridge. He, like many other linguistic analysts, can be tiresome because he is so exact, but his article, is, I think, a classic If you can stand the nitty=gritty, he can make you see the most ordinary meaning of the phrase “conscious”. Yes there are many meanings of “conscious” and “consciousness”, but I think that Moore gets at the core meaning, the most basic and possibly original one, the one from which other meanings derive.
(Unfortunately, I can’t find my copy of the Moore, but if anybody is interested I’ll find the citation. I think it’s in his “Philosophical Papers”, but can’t find my copy.)
Oops — that should have been “substance, potential, soul, act, etc.”
Matthew –
I think you’re right in trying to get into the extetsional meaning of “iPSC” and the intensional meaning (the references and sence, to use Frege’s terminology). An ostensive definition of the members of the set would be quite useful, I think. Maybe “the cells whose DNA has been reversed to the cells’ prototypical form”, or something like that. The intensional meaning, of course, is the big broblem — it answers the question: what are they? I hope you’ll do more on it. A very knotty problem.. Not that it will answer all our questions, but it’s a beginning.
Hi
Induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells is an alternative methods for studying diseases that are more robust and better simulate how the disease develops in humans. The concerns expressed regarding chimerism may be a bit strong. Technological improvements with traditional ES cell microinjections have resulted in embryos which are 100% derived from the donor, not receipient, cells. Thus the first mice born are true clones of the source ES cells.
Thanks!
My url: http://www.biotechnology-genetic-humancells.blogspot.com
I also invite people to use my links and read more.