Interview with New Director of Center for Bioethics and Human Dignity

An informative interview by Christianity Today with the new director of the Center for Bioethics and Human Dignity (CBHD), Paige Cunningham.  The CBHD website has a great collection of resources on bioethical issues from an evangelical perspective.

Here’s an excerpt:

What new bioethical challenges are you considering?

We’ve been talking with people from India and Africa about issues like the black market in organ transplantation. Crossing animals and humans has been approved in the U.K. There is a shortage of human eggs, so they want to use animal eggs. The reality is that these bioethical issues are not just an American or a Western concern; they are significant frontline issues around the world.

We recently saw news that New York will begin paying women to donate eggs for research.

People who are outside evangelicalism share real concerns about the impact on women’s health and the potential exploitation of women. It’s an irony that a young, white, smart, beautiful Ivy League college student can get up to $50,000 to donate her eggs, but in New York State, the limit is $5,000. They’re not really interested in the eggs for their genetic qualities. They just want eggs to create embryos. The issue shows real potential for exploitation of women who are trying to pay off a credit card bill or a mortgage. She’ll get one-tenth of what the Ivy League woman gets, and she may risk serious impact on her health.

What are other bioethical issues Christians need to be better educated about?

Adult stem cell research, which is using stem cells from anything other than embryos, is very successful. There are people walking around today who are alive because they had an adult stem cell treatment, using their own stem cells. There are also other alternatives to produce embryonic stem cell lines that don’t involve the destruction of an embryo: Altered Nuclear Transfer, which is still in active research, and IPS, Induced Pluripotent Stem cells. If Christians were going to pick one to be well informed on, stem cell research is probably the one I would encourage them to spend a little time with. (continue)

New Stem Cell Guidelines Disappoint Both Scientists and Religious Conservatives

Dan Gilgoff at U. S. News & World Report gives a good summary of the recently released National Institutes of Health guidelines on federal funding for stem cell research.  Many Christians will still disagree with the policy, but the results could have been much worse.  Fortunately, therapeutic cloning and the creation of embryos for research is still forbidden.

In issuing draft guidelines on federal dollars for embryonic stem cell research Friday, the National Institutes of Health let down a lot of scientists and patient advocates. That’s because the guidelines limited funding to embryos that were left over from in vitro fertilization clinics and were already earmarked for destruction.

Announcing his executive order on embryonic stem cell research last month, President Obama conspicuously left the door open to funding research using stem cells derived through embryos created expressly for scientific research or through a process called somatic cell nuclear transfer, popularly known as therapeutic cloning. But the draft NIH guidelines explicitly outlaw federal dollars for stem cells derived through either of those methods.

“I am really, really startled,” Susan L. Solomon, chief executive of the private New York Stem Cell Foundation, told the Washington Post after the NIH rules were issued. “This seems to be a political calculus when what we want in this country is a scientific research calculus.” The Post quoted a second, unnamed scientist who was present when Obama signed the stem cell executive order last month. That soure said Friday’s news was “much more political than we thought it would be. This is extremely limiting.

But conservative religious groups are hardly cheering. The most effusive praise I’ve heard from the right comes from Robby George, a professor of jurisprudence at Princeton: “It is possible that the restraint shown thus far by the NIH is in part the result of pro-life lobbying efforts, including efforts by pro-life supporters of President Obama. If so, all who have assisted in these efforts, including Obama’s pro-life supporters, deserve recognition and thanks. We can pause only for a moment, however.”  . . .

The one place where praise for the NIH move has been forthcoming is from the religious center, as represented in this instance by Faith in Public Life. The group has assembled a list of endorsements from prominent religious figures, including social conservatives like Joel Hunter, Doug Kmiec, and Samuel Rodriguez.

President Obama and Stem Cells

There’s a lot of good analysis coming out on President Obama’s handling of stem cell funding and related issues, including these good resources from the latest edition of The New Atlantis journal, available online.  Here’s a summary:

Science, Stem Cells, and Politics: The issue begins with an editorial <http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/science-and-the-obama-administration> on President Obama’s inaugural pledge to “restore science to its rightful place” — a misleading statement that denies his predecessor’s strong support for scientific research and distorts the proper relationship between science and other social goods. This pledge was followed by his March 9, 2009 executive order permitting federal funding for research that involves the destruction of human embryos. Several members of the President’s Council on Bioethics have responded with a statement <http://www.thehastingscenter.org/Bioethicsforum/Post.aspx?id=3298> taking the president to task for his misrepresentations and arguing in favor of pursuing promising avenues of research that respect ethical norms. Senior editor Yuval Levin has been closely following the new policy; you can read his coverage and the work of other New Atlantis contributors here <http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/the-obama-stem-cell-policy> .