Posted on July 18, 2006

Stem Cells, Rationality, and Unicorns

The stem cell debate is raging in the Senate, Bush is threatening to veto, and the future of rationality is dangerously close to the chopping block. Once again, America is allowing unjustified superstition to impede potentially stunning scientific progress.

On the one hand, there’s a scientific community convinced embryonic stem cells hold the key to curing many of our worst afflictions, from spinal cord injuries to Parkinson’s Disease. Against them is a contingent of religious conservatives treating this research as another beach front in the war against abortion.

This creates a strange butting of heads. The fate of a given kind of scientific research is being decided based not on empirical evidence or questions of logical morality but, instead, on grounds that are explicitly non-rational and non-scientific. The opponents of stem cell research hold their position because of one significant belief: the existence of the soul. Usage of embryos for science is morally wrong if and only if those embryos have an immaterial soul that makes them human.

With such a spirit in place, cutting up embryos is morally little different from vivisecting a ten year old. However, if there’s no such thing as the soul, embryonic stems cells are no more immoral than harvesting fingernail cuttings or inner cheek swabs. Thus the future of a science rests in the belief in something that simply doesn’t exist from a scientific perspective. Using the soul to bash down stem cell research is like saying we shouldn’t investigate alternative fuel sources because unicorns will get hurt.

In opposition to this line of reasoning, the case is often made that embryos are potential humans and are therefore not the same as shed skin cells or blood samples. But the proposed research samples aren’t to come from potential babies torn ruthlessly from a mother’s womb. No, they’re frozen already, in cold storage, and will eventually be thrown out if not pressed into the service of science. As such, they are not potentially human because we can assert with complete certainty that they will never become human. On the other hand, that blood sample might just become the basis of a clone some day, so ought we not protect it with as much rigor, too?

The simple fact is that, without the soul, the arguments against stem cell research collapse. And it seems particularly sad that this promising branch of science, one that might very well end the suffering of hundreds of thousands alive today and countless more in the future, is being held up by what is really little more than belief in unicorns.