Stem Cell Breakthrough

Following up on Saturday's Dolly story, here is another encouraging piece of news: Two separate teams of scientists in the US have apparently found a way to reprogram adult stem cells in a way that makes them pluripotent, meaning that they can turn into any kind of body cell. This was a characteristic that has so far been specific to embryonic stem cells, which was the main argument for ongoing research in that area, despite the moral issues. They have run successful tests with human cells, not animal cells - if this really works, all the arguments for ES research might be going down the drain as we speak.

Speaking of genius...

Here's a (translated) quote from Pia's Master's thesis on Aristotle's definition of happiness:

The perfection of a scientific discipline does not lie in accumulating yet more knowledge of details, but in recognizing the principles that are at its heart, and in contemplating the eternal.

A good reminder for someone who spends her days plowing through methodologies and statistics, the boring details of scientific research...

PS: Did you know that Aristotle defines happiness not as a state of being, but as an activity or a way of life? How cool is that...

Readable...?

Just took the Readability Test for this blog. It measures the level of education required to understand my blog.

The outcome surprises me.



Hmmm. The FT.com Economists' Forum Blog has college (undergrad) reading level.

Can't decide whether this is a compliment or a reason to worry.

Goodbye, Dolly

Continuing the recent trend on this blog of bringing up social and political issues, here is an article from today's Telegraph announcing that Prof. Ian Wilmut, one of the driving forces of therapeutic cloning and "father" of the clone sheep Dolly, has turned his back on his own plan to go forward with a certain form of therapeutic cloning called "nuclear transfer". His reasons are mainly practical, but he also mentions issues with "social acceptance" - the nuclear transfer method involves the use of surplus embroys from in-vitro fertilization, which are destroyed in the process.

The piece also features another (older) article by Wilmut on the debate of whether blastocysts (early-stage embryos) can really be referred to as persons. This is really the crux of the matter - if they are persons, there is no question that to destroy them means to kill human life. But are they? Wilmut makes the following distinction:
"The main reason why I do not regard a blastocyst as a person is that it has no mental life. [...] The critical issue is when this capacity to think first appears." He talks about "brain birth", the mirror image of "brain death", which is the irreversible end of all brain activity, and the point after which a person can be officially declared as dead.

What is wrong with this view? I am no scientist, nor am I a theologian, but to me linking the "personhood" of a human being to its brain activity seems dangerous, especially when we are talking about the beginning of human life. Concerning its end, things are pretty straight-forward: When we die, the body ceases to function, and the person that we used to be ceases to exist on this earth. If another person or object is the cause for this death, we usually refer to this person as "having been killed".
At the beginning of life, however, we are dealing with something (or, although it seems strange to call a mass of cells that, someONE) that, regardless of its mental abilities, will, under normal circumstances, keep developing until, even to the most practically minded, it is clearly identifiable as a baby. Any impediment to this process puts an end to existing human life - human life that is unique, has a separate identity and is therefore necessarily a person.

Therefore, it seems that even to those that do not - like me - believe that every human life, from conception until natural death, is wanted and willed by its Creator, it must be clear that producing and destroying embryos for the sake of therapy involves ending lives that are already in progress. Distinctions between "pre-personhood" and "personhood", as Wilmut makes them, are irrelevant, because even if you look at an embryo not in terms of what it is, but of what it is becoming, one has no right to interfere with this process.

On the matter of brain activity and personhood, there is another great article by the philosopher Pete Colosi on Peter Singer and Utilitarianism. Definitely worth your time.

Also, especially for those who tend to think that the Catholic Church has no solid reasons for her positions, read this.

Any thoughts? (Lurkers, I know you are out there...)

Man, I feel like a woman

This Shania Twain song takes on a whole new meaning in the light of an (arguably tendentious) news story that recently caught my attention, reporting on the introduction of a bill in California that bans from classrooms "any instructional materials that reflect adversely upon persons because of their race, sex, color, creed, handicap, national origin, or ancestry". As usual, it is not the race, handicap, national origin or even creed, but the "sex" part that worries me. Why? Here goes:

This bill SB777 (signed, incidentally, by our very own export, the Governator himself) might seem to fit nicely into the P.C. trend of our times. But if you take a closer look, you come across the following definition of "gender":

210.7. "Gender" means sex, and includes a person's gender identity and gender related appearance and behavior whether or not stereotypically associated with the person's assigned sex at birth.

What does this definition imply?

1) There is no natural sex that is reflected in both the body and the mind. People are not born as men and women, they are assigned a sex at birth, according to a stereotype, or they assume an identity, meaning that they choose whether they self-identify as a man or a woman, regardless of their biological preconditions.
2) Consequently, there is no "normal" case of gender, meaning that one is wrong to assume that people that look like men are actually men, because sex now becomes a matter of definition, or even a matter of personal choice.

The implications of this bill reach from worrying (children will now be taught that it is discriminatory to naturally refer to parents as "mother and father") to freakish (a boy can choose to use a girls' locker room or bathroom if he self-identifies as female), but what really got me thinking is a point that reaches much deeper.

What we are faced with here is the introduction of an educational system that no longer acknowledges fundamental truths. Everything, according to this approach, is a matter of choice, a relative matter. There is no such thing as a natural man or woman, a natural set of parents (consisting of a mother and a father) - in fact, anything that one acknowledges as fixed, as eternal or natural is deemed discriminatory.

I don't only think that this approach is fundamentally wrong, I also think that it reflects the basic flaw of modern mentality very well: Everything depends on me, on my choices, on my will. There is nothing outside of myself that restricts me, unless I choose a set of rules among many that I will adhere to. But even then, there is no universal world order, no truth that exists for everyone, and independently of our knowledge of it, that even we as humans are subject to. Man has now truly established his (or wait, her?) position as the king of creation. The problem is, it doesn't end here. There are things that transcend human control and understanding, that we have no choice but to bow to in awe and reverence. And if the educational system keeps developing the way it is, children will have a very hard time finding out about them.

(PS: This would merit a whole other story, but read about the case of Bruce/Brenda/David Reimer as a disturbing example of what can happen when people mess with nature.)