Stem Cell & Cloning Research & the Culture of Death December 6, 2005 Creighton University

1. Stem Cell & Cloning Research& the Culture of DeathDecember 6, 2005Creighton University Greg Schleppenbach Director of the Bishops' Pastoral Plan for Prolife Activities, Nebraska Catholic Conference

2. The Roots of the Culture of Death

3. Modern Day Garden of Eden “We are going to have almost as much knowledge and almost as much power as God. Cloning and the reprogramming of DNA is the first serious step in becoming one with God.” --Dr. Richard Seed (World Magazine, 1/17/98)

4. Cain’s Lie: “I do not know.” Today’s lies: • “We don’t know when life begins.” • “It’s a blob of tissue.” • “Fetus” • “Freedom of Choice” • “Death with Dignity” • “Assisted suicide/Euthanasia as compassion” • “Nuclear transfer, clump of cells”

5. “Cain’s failure to take responsibility: “Am I my brother’s keeper?” Today’s failure: • Abandon pregnant mothers to abortion • Abandon disabled, elderly, terminally-ill to assisted suicide/euthanasia

6. Roots of the Culture of Death • Perverse idea of freedom • Relativism • Individualism • Materialism • Secularism

7. “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.” Planned Parenthood v. Casey, 1992

8. Who is our neighbor? Anyone lying helpless in that ditch.

9. Secularism: “the heart of tragedy” “In seeking the deepest roots of the struggle between the ‘culture of life’ and the ‘culture of death’, we cannot restrict ourselves to the perverse idea of freedom… We have to go to the heart of the tragedy being experienced by modern man: the eclipse of the sense of God and of man…” --Evangelium vitae #21

10. “Roe…could not be repudiated without serious inequity to people who, for two decades of economic and social developments, have organized intimate relationships and made choices that define their views of themselves and their places in society, in reliance on the availability of abortion in the event that contraception should fail.” Planned Parenthood v. Casey, 1992

11. The Science & Ethics of Stem Cell Research Toward a consensus?

13. Promises, Premises and Published Data… Claims for embryonic stem cells unsubstantiated Current or potential embryonic stem cell problems: • Difficult to establish and maintain • Difficulty in obtaining pure cultures in the dish • Question regarding functional differentiation • Problem of immune rejection • Few and modest results in animals • Genomic instability • Ethically contentious

14. “The emerging truth in the lab is that pluripotent stem cells are hard to rein in. The potential that they would explode into a cancerous mass after a stem cell transplant might turn out to be the Pandora’s box of stem cell research.” --Prof. Glenn McGee, quoted in E. Jonietz, “Innovation: Sourcing Stem Cells” Technology Review (January/ February 2001): 32

15. Adult Stem Cells Not as Good? “There is a cell in the bone marrow that can serve as the stem cell for most, if not all, of the organs in the body,” Theise says. “It had been thought that only embryonic stem cells had such wide-ranging potential. However, this study provides the strongest evidence yet that the adult body harbors stem cells that are as flexible as embryonic stem cells.” --Neil Theise, Diane Krause, Cell, May 2001

16. “Two years ago, I would have said this is a big surprise and I wouldn’t have believed it unless it could be widely reproduced,” said Ronald Worten, head of Canada’s Stem Cell Network. “But then the dogma used to be that if you were a stem cell in [adult] bone marrow, you could only make blood cells, or if you were a stem cell in skin, you could only make skin. There’s now enough lab work to say the dogma was wrong.” --Commenting on McGill University study published in Nature Cell Biology

17. Check the board!

18. Scoreboard! Scoreboard! Adult Stem Cell vs. Embryonic Stem Cells Benefits in Human Patients ADULT: 65 • Cancers: 23 • Auto-immune disease: 14 • Cardiovascular: 1 • Ocular: 1 • Immunodeficiencies: 3 • Neural Degenerative Disease/Injuries: 3 • Anemias/Blood Conditions: 10 • Wounds/Injuries:4 • Other Metabolic disorders: 6 EMBRYONIC: -- 0 --

20. “These efforts [against federally funded experiments that destroy human embryos] are unjust and uncivil…. They represent an attempt to impose one group’s religiously supported and widely contested position on when life begins as the legally binding one in our society and they do so by risking the lives and health of all citizens.” --Ronald M. Green, Ph.D., Presentation at Virginia Wesleyan College Center for the Study of Religious Freedom, January 18, 2003

21. Embryology 101: “Zygote. This cell results from the union of an oocyte and a sperm during fertilization. A zygote is the beginning of a new human being (i.e., an embryo).” -Moore, Keith L. and Persaud, T.V.N., The Developing Human: Clinically Oriented Embryology, 7th edition, Philadelphia: Saunders 2003, p.2. “The development of a human begins at fertilization, a process by which the spermatozoon from the male and oocyte from the female unite to give rise to a new organism, the zygote.” -Sadler, T.W. Langman’s Medical Embryology, 7th edition. Baltimore: Williams & Wilkins, 1995, p.3. “Almost all higher animals start their lives from a single cell, the fertilized ovum (zygote)… The time of fertilization represents the starting point in the life history, or ontogeny, of the individual.” -Carlson, Bruce M., Patten’s Foundations of Embryology, 6th edition, New York: McGraw-Hill, 1996, p.3.

22. Status of the human embryo, according to federal advisory groups on bioethics 1994: “The pre-implantation human embryo warrants serious moral consideration as a developing form of human life.” -National Institutes of Health, Report of the Human Embryo Research Panel (Sept. 1994), p.2. 1999: “[M]ost would agree that human embryos deserve respect as a form of human life.” President Clinton’s National Bioethics Advisory Commission, Ethical Issues in Human Stem Cell Research (Sept. 1999), Vol. I, p.ii. 2002: “In medical terms, embryo usually refers to the developing human from fertilization (the zygote stage) until the end of the eighth week of gestation…” -National Academy of Sciences, Scientific and Medical Aspects of Human Reproductive Cloning (National Academy Press 2002), p. 262 (italics added).

23. The traditional Western ethic has always placed great emphasis on the intrinsic worth and equal value of every human life, regardless of its age or condition… This traditional ethic is still clearly dominant, but there is much to suggest that it is being eroded at its core and may eventually be abandoned. This of course will produce profound changes in Western medicine and in Western society…. It will become necessary and acceptable to place relative rather than absolute values on things such as human lives….”

24. “The process of eroding the old ethic and substituting the new has already begun. It may be seen most clearly in changing attitudes toward human abortion… Since the old ethic has not yet been fully displaced, it has been necessary to separate the idea of abortion from the idea of killing, which continues to be socially abhorrent. The result has been a curious avoidance of the scientific fact, which everybody knows, that human life begins at conception and is continuous whether intra- or extra-uterine until death.”

25. “The very considerable semantic gymnastics which are required to rationalize abortion as anything but the taking of a human life would be ludicrous if they were not often put forth under socially impeccable auspices. It is suggested that this schizophrenic sort of subterfuge is necessary, because while a new ethic is being accepted the old one has not yet been rejected…” -A New Ethic for Medicine and Society,” Editorial in California Medicine, Volume 113, number 3, September 1970

26. Proclaiming the Gospel of Life Know, live and spread our Faith.

27. Celebrate the Gospel of Life Rediscover and celebrate awe for human life. “By his incarnation the Son of God has united himself in some fashion with every human being. This saving event reveals to humanity not only the boundless love of God, who ‘so loved the world that he gave his only Son” (Jn 3:16), but also the imcomparable value of every human person.” -Evangelium vitae #2

28. Serving the Gospel of Life • Parish pro-life efforts • Nebraska Catholics for Life • Pregnancy-assistance center • Project Rachel • Nebraska Coalition for Compassionate Care • Nebraska Coalition for Ethical Research • Natural Family Planning • Hospice • St. Vincent de Paul • Various other kinds of pastoral and social activity

29. Family as the Sanctuary of Life “Within the ‘people for life’ …the family has a special role… It is truly ‘the sanctuary of life: the place in which life—the gift of God—can be properly welcomed and protected’… Consequently, the role of the family in building a culture of life is decisive and irreplaceable… It is above all in raising children that the family fulfills its mission to proclaim the Gospel of Life.”

30. Family as the Sanctuary of Life “It is an illusion to think that we can build a true culture of human life if we do not help the young to accept and experience sexuality and love and the whole of life according to their true meaning and in their close interconnection. Sexuality, which enriches the whole person, ‘manifest’ its inmost meaning in the leading the person to the gift of self in love. The trivialization of sexuality is among the principle factors which have led to contempt for new life. Only a tru love is able to protect life.”