The recent decision of the Medical Research Council (MRS) to allow experimentations in Canada on live human embryos up to 17 days gestation age, is but the latest episode of a running debate going back to July 1978. That date marks the birth of the first “test-tube baby” in Oldham, England. That birth triggered an unending and worldwide series of discussions and controversies regarding the ethics of procedures such as embryos experimentation, freezing embryos, cloning, gene splicing, genetic engineering, animal-human fertilization, and surrogate motherhood. The list expands almost daily.
Disquieting evidence of where tampering with the making of new life can lead came on April 21, 1987, when the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office ruled that new forms of animal life can be patented. At the same time it left the door open for patenting new types of humans in the future. There was nothing to prevent experimentation to produce the new types of humans that would be ready when the Patent Office widens the door.
Second class and disposable
In-vitro fertilization has made it possible to create new human beings outside the mother’s body, in a petri dish. The original intention was to transfer this tiny human embryo into the uterus of a woman in the hope that it would develop to maturity, and that the mother would give birth to a baby. However, more embryos than are needed for implantation are created, and these are considered “spares” and available for research; and other embryos are created deliberately for experimentation.
Speaking in the Australian Senate on April 23, 1985, Senator Harradine stated: “Fertilization of ova in excess of the number that the operator is prepared in implant in the ovum donor is synonymous with the deliberate creation of a group of second-class human embryos available for experimentation…I am advised that at the U.K. research institute at Bourne Hall (The headquarters of Drs Steptoe and Edwards, pioneers of IVF) women who are seeking routine sterilization go to the top of the waiting list, if they are prepared to agree to undergo super-ovulation beforehand so that their ova can be harvested for use by the experimenters.”
In the early 1980s, as the general public began to learn about the types of experiments being performed on live human embryos, there was an outcry in Britain, in Australia and some countries of Western Europe. Senator Harradine, introducing this Human Embryos Experimentation Bill, said: “My Bill is designed to prevent the creation of a race of laboratory human beings second class and disposable.”
Secrecy
Most of the experimentation work was – and still is – carried out secretly. Michael Trend, writing in The Spectator (16 January 1988), said: “I asked a number of doctors most closely involved in the field of experiments on human embryos what is new in their area of interest. They were all reluctant to be drawn on this question. If, as one specialist put it to me, you had discovered something ‘especially fruity’ in the past few years that one thing that you would not do at the moment is go “round telling everyone about it.”
However, and despite this general secrecy, it was the boasting, by a few of the research scientists about their strange experiments and goals that alerted some of the public to what was being done.
Australia
Speaking to the Australian Senate, April 23, 1985, Senator Harradine referred to the cloak of secrecy surrounding the work of Dr. Ian Johnston at Melbourne University. He explained that the media had reported on 19, November 1981, that Dr. Johnston had received a grant of $100,000 from the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) for a research project, which involved the slicing up of embryos for study under an electron microscope.
The media report was greeted by outrage and a public outcry by both Roman Catholic and Anglican spokesmen. The research team kept silence, but three months later the Director of Medical Services at Melbourne Royal Women’s Hospital, where the research was going on, calmly stated that the research had stopped in October, that is, a month before the media report. The hospital authorities never made a satisfactory explanation of their delay in commenting on the statements in the media. Furthermore, when church leaders asked the hospitals to publish their ethical guidelines, they refused to do so. A report in the Melbourne Age (8 February, 1982,), quotes the manager of the Queen Victoria Hospital as saying: “Our worry was, that the community could misinterpret them. It is a very emotional subject and we were concerned that people who are against the programme could nit-pick the guidelines.”
As Senator Harradine said: “So much for public consultation and bringing the public into the picture so that informed decisions can be made.” The hospital did not mention that the community, which they excluded from having information about projects, was the very same community, which was, willy-nilly, paying for the research through taxation.
Professor Carl Wood
Professor Carl Wood, a pioneer of in-vitro fertilization in Victoria, Australia, raised the possibility of allowing embryos to grow in the laboratory until nervous tissue was formed. This tissue, he said, was suitable for transplants into adult sufferers of various types of nervous disorders. The Australian (28, October, 1981), quoted him as saying that some scientists had proposed this type of research to the Queen Victoria Medical Centre, but ethical implications had to be considered. Three years later Professor Wood was suggesting types of genetic engineering. According to The Canberra Times (17, May 1984), Professor wood said: “In the future it may be possible to change the embryo or the foetus, and people have put it to us that maybe the brain of a male embryo should be injected with female hormones to reduce the killing trait without altering the reproductive capacity, on the assumption that our species had developed sufficiently to make male aggressiveness unnecessary for survival.”
Professor Peter Singer
Peter Singer’s name is known throughout the pro-life world because of his writings, which call for the killing of handicapped babies. His contempt for human embryos is summed up in his statement that embryos “have no more awareness than a lettuce.” He is, by the way, the director of Monash University’ Centre of Human Bioethics, in Victoria, Australia.
In August 1986, he argued at the International Conference on Health, Law and Ethics held in Sydney, N.S.W., that experimental scientists should be able to dissect live human embryos up to six weeks of gestational age “when they begin to feel pain.” In the same month, speaking to the American Society of Law and Medicine, also in Sydney, he said that it might be possible to develop isolated organs, which could be cultivated in-vitro and used to replace diseased organs (Melbourne Age, 20, August 1986).
Great Britain
Perhaps more than anyone else it is Dr. Robert Edwards, the embryologist who worked with Steptoe, who has alarmed the people of Britain with his Dr. Strangelove ideas. On 23, June 1984, a newspaper report said that Edwards had grown an embryo for 13 days. The report continued: “This is already, nine days longer than it has so far been necessary to culture an embryo to create a pregnancy, and it died only after it failed to attach itself to the glass petri dish which it mistook for the wall of the mother’s womb.”
Dr. Edwards has also suggested that it might be possible to identify embryonic cells which could be developed into specific organs. The Australian Financial Review (19, October 1984), quoted Edwards as saying these cells could be used to repair the damaged tissue in the organ of adults. Two years earlier, in The Guardian (10, July, 1982), Edwards said that human embryos could be grown to provide transplants. He said that heart muscle cells could be obtained from a three-week old embryo “without difficulty.”
In 1984, Dr. Edwards was on record as suggesting implanting human embryos in sheep or rabbits. (Human embryos have since then been implanted in sheep in Australia).
Naturally all these researchers claim that their experiments are all undertaken to “benefit mankind:” to prevent disease, obtain better contraceptives, aid the infertile and so on. Andrew Gimson, writing in The Spectator (5 April, 1985), summed up the feelings of many pro-lifers.
“The reason why research [on embryos] should not be done is that to get used to using human life (whether we believe it to be actual or potential) as a means to an end is corrupting. We could act from the most humane motives, and achieve astonishing scientific advances, but in the process we would lose our humanity.”
Canada
Maybe it was the timing of the release of The Medical Research Council’s ethical guidelines, March 3, 1988, in the middle of the fallout of the Supreme Court’s decision on the abortion law, or maybe it is because the Canadian public is completely unaware of the types of research that are being conducted on human embryos, but whatever the reason, the silence that greeted the guidelines was deafening. Unlike West Germany, Australia and Britain, there has not been a peep from the churches, from politicians, or medical and legal groups. Even pro-life groups, trying to keep their heads above the flood water of the tidal wave following the January 28 decision, have been quiet.
It is important to note that the MRC is one of the agencies which funds scientific research, using public money. Canadians have the right to know how their money is used. Secondly, we can learn from other countries how they have managed to control their own Dr. Strangeloves.
By way of contrast, The Council of Europe, representing 21 West European parliaments on September 24, 1986 called on all the governments to ban commercial use of human embryos and to restrict genetic research. They declared that, “human embryos and fetuses must be treated in all circumstances with the respect due to human dignity.”
First of two articles
