As usual, Shakespeare nails it.
Three allusions in a dozen words.
“As flies to wanton boys are we to th’ gods, They kill us for their sport.”
As I was thinking through some of the implications of some dramatic scientific research these words from King Lear slipped back into view.
Shakespeare compresses into one sentence the anxiety that we don’t matter to the powers that be; that clever experimentation may not be carried out with the highest ethics. Since this is King Lear, we find it hard to tell the difference between power and love.
Great leaps forward in the world of stem cell research have reintroduced us to the dilemmas thrown up by both mad and sane scientists and the challenge to lessen human suffering, resist fate and tragedy, and deepening our control of the hidden world under our skins.
Whenever I am confronted with news of a medical breakthrough in the media, I am taken straight back in my memory to that very unappealing smelly and very dead frog I was given to dissect in biology lessons as an adolescent.
I found I had very little interest in cutting it up and so learnt very little biology. What I did want to do though was to get back to the history lesson where we had been discussing Machiavelli taking the provocative and deadly view that the ends justify the means.
All of this means, faced with the latest developments in stem cell research, I have to educate myself about the implications of what is at stake in the science. Stem cells, synthetic embryos and genetic manipulation are a different world.
Not that the media seem much better informed I have been. When last week the news of some successful stem cell research emanating from a laboratory in Cambridge had been published in Nature the headlines were misleadingly lurid:
“Researchers from the University of Cambridge have created model embryos from mouse stem cells that form a brain, a beating heart, and the foundations of all the other organs of the body – a new avenue for recreating the first stages of life.”
It all sounds dramatically Frankenstein. Scientists are creating life by making synthetic stem cells grow!
“The researchers mimicked natural processes in the lab by guiding the three types of stem cells found in early mammalian development to the point where they start interacting. By inducing the expression of a particular set of genes and establishing a unique environment for their interactions, the researchers were able to get the stem cells to ‘talk’ to each other.
“The stem cells self-organised into structures that progressed through the successive developmental stages until they had beating hearts and the foundations of the brain, as well as the yolk sac where the embryo develops and gets nutrients from in its first weeks. Unlike other synthetic embryos, the Cambridge-developed models reached the point where the entire brain, including the anterior portion, began to develop.”
In fact the dramatic blurb gives entirely the wrong impression.
It’s no wonder that the media became over-excited. But despite the excitement, it has nothing to do with being able to create life without human fertilisation.
Instead it gives significant insight into the way cells interact with each other and so form the structures that make human beings. Many of the things that go wrong – like cancer and infections – are due to the way that cells move and inter-relate with each other in the body. Understanding what goes wrong helps scientists and doctors put things right. But facilitating stem cells talking to each other in a blastula is nowhere near making life as agents of life rather than dependant co agents with God and each other.
Quite as interesting as the biology are the ethics. The Catholic Church opposes research involving human embryonic stem cells, which require the destruction of the human embryo during their isolation. But the Church has championed adult stem cell research, which does not involve human embryonic stem cells, and has no difficulty with this new discovery which involves synthetic stem cells.
The whole area of using cells from living embryos is predicated on the ends, new research to help medicine mend our ills, thereby justifying the means – the destruction of embryos.
In fact, it may be that the deeper significance of the Cambridge research into stem cells is the fact that it highlights that ethical safeguards are lagging a long way behind scientific advance and competence.
A number of medical and scientific voices have sounded notes of alarm following the Cambridge research that the ethical rules and regulations are insufficient.
It was only four years ago that the Chinese scientist He Jiankui of the Southern University of Science and Technology in Shenzhen, genetically modified the embryos of a pair of twins in order to create prototype genetic sequence that would provide a defence against some forms of HIV.
He was ultimately jailed for forging the paperwork that ostensibly provided the permission to do the research. There were claims that one of the by-products of the genetic modulation was to increase brain power, learning and retention which threw up complex questions about the agreed ethics of prevention of illness on the one hand and genetically modified improvements to the human condition on the other.
Ian McGilchrist, one of our most prominent authorities on the philosophy of the mind, has reminded our culture that the two sides of our brains are not in balance or synch in this technological culture.
He claims the right-hand side whose function is to oversee the mapping of meaning has been overtaken by the left hand side whose job it is to measure our environment and drive forward our technological expertise.
The Church has suffered some growing sense of embarrassment in modernity at the pace and power of science, but science desperately needs the restraint and the accountability of a powerful moralistically competent guardian.
The Catholic Church is placed like no other agency to lead the way in constructing ethical guidelines for medical and scientific research.
You don’t have to be very clever to be suspicious of Machiavelli’s willingness to allow the supposed end to be achieved by suspect means.
Even though we are no nearer to being able to step into the shoes of God and create life, we are in ever deeper need of being saved from ourselves and our the unforeseen consequences of our superficial technological cleverness.
Whether you frame it in terms of Mcgilchrist’s two sides of the brain, or the more poetic image of a brain needing to be partnered and informed by the soul, it is beginning to look as though science may be getting over its adolescent strop with the parental figure of the Catholic Church.
The time has come to deepen the recognition growing that it needs help in managing the morals and ethics to boundary our inventiveness, without which the balance between good and harm that our inventiveness pivots on, may be lost.
(Photo: Andrii Vodolazhskyi/Shutterstock via CNA)
This page is available to subscribers. Click here to sign in or get access.
Areas of Catholic Herald business are still recovering post-pandemic.
However, we are reaching out to the Catholic community and readership, that has been so loyal to the Catholic Herald. Please join us on our 135 year mission by supporting us.
We are raising £250,000 to safeguard the Herald as a world-leading voice in Catholic journalism and teaching.
We have been a bold and influential voice in the church since 1888, standing up for traditional Catholic culture and values. Please consider donating.