Today’s news is that Robert Lanza et all have taken ten stem
cells from a human embryo and found that this procedure did not kill the
embryo. I don’t know whether this
report in Nature deals with the blastocyst stage or not, but that is the usual
point of implantation in IVF. The moral issue applies at every point in
embryonic development after the initial blastomere stage.
This is the point at which my morals, and I believe most
human morals, recoil. The consequence of
removing embryonic cells is that when the embryo is allowed to develop you get
an experimental human. Your newborn
baby is a lab experiment.
We cannot know if the removal of ten cells from the blastocyst will have a consequence in the future infant. But we cannot allow humans to be test subjects for a test that will take a lifetime to understand.
It is immoral to consciously bring a human into this world and watch to see what the harmful consequences will be from embryonic experimentation.
That is my main moral objection to human genetic
engineering. It is time to yell and
scream about this experiment.