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...)