When the Homily is about Immunology

The Chicken or the Egg

Given my "profession", bioethics is an important issue to me. Actually, it should be to all of us, since matter matters. Bioethics, really, encompasses most everything we do and even the more specific aspects of the term often apply to the general notion of ethics. For instance, adultery involves bioethics on two fronts: the macro and the micro. Clearly your body is involved on a macro scale and clearly your spouse, children, and your community is involved on a macro scale. But also on a micro scale we delve into the potential for disease and unwanted procreation.

Much of my take on bioethics has evolved since my own involvement in biological science, and if you read here regularly you have no doubt heard some of the stories including the one where I was a liberal Episcopalian who had grown to shrug his shoulders at abortion until in a pathology lab he held in his palm the shattered and brutalized remains of an aborted human being.

A story I have not related involves my college coursework in which we were growing up our own tissue culture. The source of that culture - curiously enough, given my present endeavors - was a chicken embryo.

The process began by obtaining a fertilized chicken egg. Then the egg is cracked open and the tiny little dot of tissue (the chicken embryo) is minced up and placed into the tissue culture container, and after a little while you get a monolayer of chicken cells growing on the bottom of the plastic container - all of which are very much like stem cells: very possibly multipotent and perhaps even omnipotent in terms of its future development. (The process is a bit more complex, but I will spare you the details).

The school, however, had limited equipment supplies and so we students had to be divided into small groups and each group had to take turns setting up their culture. Unfortunately, my group would be last.

I cannot recall how much time passed before we had our chance to crack our egg, but in order to have a successful experiment we had to keep the egg viable and thus it remained in the incubator...growing. By the time we did get around to cracking the egg we were horrified to find not a tiny or even a medium sized blob of tissue, but a living (which is not to say that the other group's blobs were not living) AND moving chicken. A head, tiny wings, feet and even some early fluff. We killed it, minced up part of it, and tried to grow up our cells.

Our experiment failed. But, the ugliness of it left an impression on me.

Embryonic stem cell research requires the destruction of a living human embryo in very much the same way (essentially) that we were wiping out these chicken embryos - albeit never at the stage of development that our group had to deal with. That being noted, it really must grieve proponents of this research to know that in an abortion you can legally rip to shreds an embryo that has all the appearances of a human being and is able to move and respond to pain, but you cannot legally do so with an embryo that is little more (and I use that phrase with fear and trembling) than a collection of cells for the purpose of harvesting it for growth and research.

It is a situation of political hypocrisy to ban one and not the other. However there is the additional moral issue of "tinkering" with human embryos when we look at stem cell research. When does human life begin? When is it sacred and when is it simply bio matter? But then again, matter matters, right?

I fear we are pushing ourselves into a realm where things are vastly beyond our ability to comprehend the full scope and ramifications of our actions. Morality and values are EVERYWHERE and in EVERYTHING. In our politics it is especially present and I wrestle with it most everyday.

Whether we ban abortion or force rich people to give their money to poor people, we are making very blatant moral decisions here - often based on our religious beliefs (which curiously is often cited by secularists as something horrific). It is however, quite inescapable.

As such, I am compelled by my conscience and my experience to err on the side of caution with regard to embryonic stem cell research. Our unproven quest for a cure might lead us down a very ugly road whose ending we cannot see in this life.

If indeed, matter matters, then be very careful.