The Guardian view on stem cells and embryos: creating life’s likeness in a lab
Science often moves faster than moral thought progresses, leaving the public disoriented and exposing the limits of legislators’ imagination. Many people will be struggling to make sense of the astonishing breakthroughs presented at this week’s International Society for Stem Cell Research’s (ISSCR) annual meeting in Boston. The work by Prof Magdalena Żernicka-Goetz, of Cambridge University and the California Institute of Technology, creating human embryo-like models from stem cells, without the need for eggs or sperm, raises questions about life itself. There seems an element of playing God in growing a tiny human-ish beating heart in a lab, however scientifically desirable is Jitesh Neupane’s work at Cambridge’s Gurdon Institute.
Persuading stem cells to develop until clumps of them resemble an embryo or an embryonic organ in conditions that mimic the womb is currently an unregulated process in the UK, though transferring these into a woman’s womb is prohibited. However, given the similarities that these stem cell models have with human embryos, they offer enormous potential to unlock the secrets of early pregnancy and give an insight into what leads to miscarriages or birth defects. Without clear guidelines to promote responsible research and maintain public confidence in it, though, scientists only have their conscience – and the fear of losing their reputation – to guide them.
Already the technology can grow these cells beyond the equivalent of the 14-day limit placed on human embryo experimentation. This restriction was put into place because of the philosopher Mary Warnock’s belief that, before a fortnight, “the human embryo hasn’t yet decided how many people it’s going to be”. Her 1984 report on infertility treatment and embryological research undergirds existing law. But these clumps of stem cells are not human in the way we understand that word. Bioethics is the ethics of life. But what does the term “life” mean? In ancient Greek, life is expressed distinctly as bios and zoe. The latter is a term that designates life as bare or animal life.
Bios, by contrast is about a “course or way of living”. Stem cell clumps have no bios. They perhaps might obtain it if they were allowed to band together and form a brain that had feelings and thoughts. Such an experiment would be justly unacceptable to current public opinion.
In 2021 the ISSCR issued research