HUMAN DIGNITY IN THE BIOTECH CENTURY: A CHRISTIAN VISION FOR PUBLIC POLICY

1. (561 words)
How quickly we forget! When President Bush used his first televised speech to the American people (on August 9, 2001) to lay out his policy on the funding of stem cell research, much of the press coverage was focused on those conservatives who condemned it as a sell-out. Now we are being told that even conservatives are peeling off and demanding that he open the floodgates and fund the mass production of cloned embryos! What’s going on here?

Well, the policy is a principled compromise. It funds basic research without funding the killing of any more embryos. I supported it then, and I applaud the backbone of the administration in sustaining it now. It stands as a beacon of sanity in an increasingly frenzied debate. And because the debate keeps getting hotter and the issues go way beyond destructive embryo research, there has been no better time to call serious Christians to start thinking long and hard about what lies ahead in the biotech century.

That’s why I have been working with my colleague bioethicist Dr. Nigel Cameron and InterVarsity Press to pull together the best thinking that’s being done by Christians on the biotech revolution. Our book HUMAN DIGNITY IN THE BIOTECH CENTURY has just been launched. It covers all the key questions of human biotechnology, and brings together leading voices in the debate.

Bioscience professor David Prentice lays out the biotech agenda. Founding president of Americans United for Life, attorney Paige Cunningham, writes on strategy for the pro-life movement. Two writers look at the genetics revolution: Ben Mitchell, who edits the journal Ethics and Medicine and advises the Southern Baptist Convention on bioethics, and Dr. David Stevens, director of the Christian Medical Society. The prestigious National Journal recently named the ten people who will most influence our nation’s thinking on bioethics, and two of them are among our writers - Wesley Smith, lawyer, journalist, and controversialist; and Richard Doerflinger, one of the shrewdest men in Washington and the voice of the Catholic church on biopolicy. Dr. Christopher Hook is head of ethics education at Mayo Clinic. And there are more. Read this book and you will begin to see what is really at stake.

For example, when you hear the latest chorus of demands for embryo stem-cell research, you need to know what lies behind it. The advocates of unethical science want to clone human embryos, and in huge quantities. They are not really interested in a few more cell lines, or access to so-called “spare” embryos in in vitro clinic freezers. These make good debating points, but they are peripheral to their main aims. So-called “therapeutic cloning,” which has proved so powerful in the public imagination, requires the manufacture and destruction of millions upon millions of embryos, each one of which requires an egg from the ovary of a woman. What few Americans realize is that around the world nation after nation has outlawed this unethical research. Germany, Australia, Canada, and Norway have all decided to turn “therapeutic cloners” into felons; and on July 9 of this year, they were joined by France! All these countries have passed their own version of the Brownback-Landrieu bill that is held up in the Senate.

We need to turn our minds loose on this agenda so that our Christian worldview thinking can shape the future of US policy. Call us now to get your copy of HUMAN DIGNITY IN THE BIOTECH CENTURY.

2.(525 words)
If someone had suggested a year ago that cash-strapped California would be asked to amend the state constitution to siphon $6 billion (yes, billion; you heard me right) into the biotech industry and its university affiliates people would have laughed. But they would not have been reckoning with the power of the embryo stem cell research hype. Millions of dollars have already been spent to get the signatures needed, and millions more are being raised for a TV ad campaign. Perhaps the most bizarre proposition in American history will be on California’s November ballot.

As my colleague, Dr. Nigel Cameron, recently pointed out in an op-ed in the San Francisco Chronicle, this $6 billion subvention is intended to sustain biotech researchers from the public purse while they pursue a project that private investors have already decided is literally worthless, as they have refused to invest in it. And it is a project that nation after nation around the world has already declared to be a felony. In our new book, HUMAN DIGNITY IN THE BIOTECH CENTURY, Dr. Nathan Adams of the Christian Legal Society argues that cloning embryos for research is fundamentally unjust; and Bill Saunders of the Family Research Council draws the inevitable connection between the abuse of the human embryo and the Nuremberg trials.

But we also need to grasp the cloning proposition’s bizarre economics. It’s being said that this vast investment will actually save healthcare costs, as well as cure diseases, even though it has to be imposed by hype and ballot on the wishes of California’s elected representatives (who will need a supermajority to overrule its plans).

As Nigel Cameron points out, this claim is preposterous. Anyone making it in an IPO prospectus would do jail time. But the proposition is a prospectus to the people of California, and the combination of hype and hubris needs to be nailed. The one thing certain about the proposition is that it will pump billions of public dollars into the pockets of unethical researchers and businesses. Even were “therapeutic cloning” to work, it would be extraordinary expensive. But this is not a mere matter of opinion. California’s business community has already made up its mind. If it believed the hyped hope of those behind the proposition, it would be pouring funds into the field in the expectation of reaping vast profits. Instead, it has already voted with its feet.

Some of us were present in the White House two years ago to hear President Bush deliver a remarkable speech on human cloning and the need for biotechnology to be subject to ethics. “Advances in biomedical technology must never come at the expense of human conscience. As we seek what is possible, we must always ask what is right, and we must not forget that even the most noble ends do not justify any means.” ( April 10, 2002 ) I don’t think the point can be better made. And it’s in that spirit that we have written and edited HUMAN DIGNITY IN THE BIOTECH CENTURY, to help thinking Christians think through the challenges that lie ahead in our lifetimes and those of our children and grandchildren.

3.(564 words)
A short time ago, I was on Capitol Hill with my colleague, bioethics expert Dr. Nigel Cameron, to launch our new book HUMAN DIGNITY IN THE BIOTECH CENTURY in which we bring together key experts to help the church understand the incredible implications of the biotech revolution.

Someone else who was there was a remarkable young woman named Rebecca Griffin. She is a living example of biotechnology, since she was conceived through in vitro fertilization. As she says, “I was one of those ‘test tube babies’ that could just as easily have been sacrificed because I wasn't quite human enough to matter.” But Rebecca has more to say than that. Let me tell you her story. She knew about Alzheimer’s disease long before President Reagan’s illness got it on prime time, and celebrities started exploiting it to support the kind of unethical, destructive embryo research that President Reagan was so much against. Because Rebecca has lived through it. Listen to it in her own words.   She was only nine years old when her father was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease, and she spent the next seven years helping her mother care for him. They cared for him at home because they couldn't afford a nursing home until the beginning of her senior year of high school.   So the events surrounding President Reagan's death struck a very personal note for her. And what is her response? “As a caregiver who has lived through the situation myself,” writes Rebecca, “I say this to other sufferers: don't listen to them. Don't buy into this hoax.” She continues: “Those who push for a lifting of the ban on government funding to kill more embryos for research dangle hope in front of desperate, hurting people, in their hunt for public support. It is exploitation at its most debased and repugnant.”   “Sometimes things do happen to us, things that we can’t control, but don't let anyone use our grief to push their agenda through.”   Rebecca makes the case eloquently. The advocates of unethical research are preying on those whose love for the sick or whose fear of disease makes them vulnerable. At the same time, they conveniently ignore the fact that it is adult stem cell research , which is entirely ethical, that is producing a string of cures and sending people home from hospitals.   Last year, together with Dr. James Dobson, Joni Eareckson Tada, Senator Sam Brownback, and other distinguished leaders Dr. Nigel Cameron and I launched the Manifesto on The Sanctity of Life in the Brave New World. The Manifesto calls for a comprehensive ban on cloning. It calls for a ban on germline genetic engineering – inheritable genetic changes. It calls for a ban on genetic discrimination. And it calls for a wide-ranging review of the patent law to prevent the commercial exploitation of human tissue. In our book, HUMAN DIGNITY IN THE BIOTECH CENTURY, we restate the Manifesto and set out the agenda in much more detail.   We need to understand what is going on, so we can answer those who would exploit our sick relatives with scientific facts and with clear moral arguments. We can’t all be as eloquent as Rebecca Griffin, and we can’t all speak from her position as caregiver to her father during his final years. But we have all an equal responsibility to think hard and speak out. The future depends on it.