The notion of artificial life created in a lab – heralded today with the news that scientists at Cambridge have managed to combine two sets of mouse stem cells to start the process of embryo creation is mildly alarming, no? Shades of Aldous Huxley, Brave New World? These aren’t exactly embryos; a scientist friend prefers to call them embryoids, or proto-embryos, a bit like those brain-like organoids that can now be created to mimic the behaviour of actual brains. But it would seem that the Cambridge team may have come close to actual embryo creation; if it had added a third set of stem cells, the yolk, to sustain development, then it’s possible it would have gone on to develop an actual mouse embryo from there. But they held off in order to consider the ethical implications.
The next step is to create the same sort of embryoid with humans – though it’s often more difficult than we envisage to replicate results from animals in human models. And if it’s just the same combination of two sets of stem cells, without the third that allows for development as an embryo, that’s morally unproblematic. But what if they take the next step, and combine the three groups of stem cells, and it works, and they create an embryo? That’s where we get into ethically tricky territory. We then have the prospect of the lab creation of actual human embryos, human life in its earliest stage, for the purposes of experimentation. So, human lives instrumentalised from the outset, embryos that could, if implanted, develop into a foetus and ultimately a baby. The development could lead in other directions too; if you can create human life from stem cells alone, I suppose potentially you may not need fuddy duddy male and female gametes, egg and sperm, for the purposes of reproduction.
But that’s to get ahead of ourselves. Right now, it’s the prospect of the creation of embryos for experimentation that should give us pause. But as Professor Magdalena Zernicka-Goetz from the Cambridge team observes: ‘For this research, we use fertilised human eggs, kindly donated by IVF couples where possible. But these are small in number…’ It’s a useful reminder that this research is already profoundly problematic: fertilised human eggs are no longer just eggs, are they? They are zygotes, the combination of male and female gametes that make us what we are. Human lives, right at the start of the trajectory of development. We’re already on that slippery slope of human experimentation; we’ve slipped.
The next step is the campaign to lift the limits on research established by the Warnock Commission, at 14 days’ development. Permitting experiments up to that point in itself was a radical unethical step; the limit was chosen at that point because after 14 days it’s unlikely the embryo will split to become twins. As the Baroness observed, “[this is] when I become me”. She’s now warning against the extension of the time limit, on the basis that we should be far more clear about what is possible within it before we do so. Bit late to try and hold the pass now.
It’ll be uphill work, though, sticking to the present limits on human embryo research. Because this, like the creation of artificial life in the lab in Cambridge, is being justified, like so much else, in advancing our understanding of human reproduction, of why pregnancies fail, especially in the case of IVF. In Britain you can pretty well get away with anything if you say it’s to help sick kiddies or help infertile couples become pregnant. At what point you say that experimenting on early human lives for the benefit of others is anyone’s guess. In pragmatic, post-Protestant Britain, the end justifies the means.
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