EATING THE FUTURE

KERRY'S STEM CELL POSITION BOTH HYPOCRITAL AND INHUMANE

When John Kerry talks about stem cell research, he says "science" and "scientists" so often, you would think you were listening to Dr. Victor Frankenstein.

In a way, you are.

As you may recall, Dr. Frankenstein was so interested in finding out if he could re-animate dead tissue, he didn't think through the consequences of his pursuits to his subject or to the society. Mary Shelley's classic horror story is the quintessential man/monster question--who is really the monster? The re-animated corpse, forced into a new life it is neither ready for nor desirous of--or the Doctor himself, playing God without the heart of God for the creatures he creates?

For Kerry, there is no consideration of the consequences of pursuing a line of research that uses discarded human embryos. Although they have been conceived, and he claims to believe that "life begins at conception," he seems not to notice that--by his own words--such research requires that human beings be murdered.

President Bush came to this question with the genie half out of the bottle. There are existing stem cell lines, and he did not order them destroyed. Like the early medical experimenters who dissected corpses culled from the graveyard, he decided that what's already dead is already dead, so let's find out if there's any medical good to be had of them. But he forbade the federal government from paying for the creation of new lines, without interfering with the private sector's right to do such research.

After all, if George Soros can spend 10 million dollars trying to defeat the president, why can't he pay for some research? There's no shortage of money on the embryo-killer side. If they want to rob the graves, let them pay for it.

This is a sensible and moral position for several reasons. First, to put the federal government in a position to make it profitable to harvest embryos leads inevitably to the deliberate creation of more. We will, in the name of the people, create life with the express intention of destroying it.

Second, it is a culturally schizophrenic position to both encourage infertile couples to conceive because they have a right to be parents, treating the embryos as proto-children, and to encourage researchers to treat the same entities as disposable and experimental. It is fundamentally illegal to sell people--at least at the moment. It must remain illegal for the government to pay for the creation of doomed life.

Finally, this question cuts at the very heart of human nature, of worth and value, of good and evil. Would it be right to torture and kill one person to save many? It is an ancient philosophical dilemma. On the one hand, every individual has worth and value, and it would be wrong to "trade" their life for the lives of others. On the other, the collective good can be served by the sacrifice of one.

But the sacrifice of a human life can only be honorable when it is voluntary, as in the case of a soldier who gives his life for his country and its security. Only an individual can sacrifice his life--for another to do so on his behalf is murder, plain and simple.

And so we must say, to Christopher Reeve and Nancy Reagan and Michael J. Fox--we love you. You are special and unique and of infinite worth. But you were once an embryo, too. And each of those you seek to kill to bring about the cure you crave is also an individual of infinite potential and infinite worth. We can ask you--but not compel you--to sacrifice yourself for that one, but we cannot in the name of science sacrifice that one for you.

This self-absorbed culture is not in desperate need of cures for diseases and ways to grow new organs outside the human body and more money for increasingly amoral research projects. More urgently we need to re-assess our attitude toward human life, what it is and what it's worth.

Today they ask us to breed children to cure the ills of their parents and grandparents--not a surprising request from the generations that introduced and perfected abortion on demand for the sake of convenience. But tomorrow, if science finds, or even theorizes, that the blood of the old may be useful to the health of the young, or if in mapping the human genome we have uncovered the genetic markers for character flaws and behavioral quirks--then all bets are off. For we will have already erased the line that separates cutting edge science from ghoulish experimentation.

If we proceed on the path John Kerry recommends and the president is seeking to close off--then we are no better than the nazis experimenting on camp victims, than Saddam torturing his prisoners for fun, than--more keenly--the witch fattening Hansel and Gretel so she can eat them.

When human life is negotiable then everything--and everyone--is on the table.