A Life Science Lesson for the NIH Director

It’s no secret that Francis Collins, the director of the National Institutes of Health (and an evangelical Christian), is a proponent of embryo-destructive research. No matter what his other qualifications, President Obama would never have appointed the former head of the Human Genome Project if Collins did not agree with the party line on funding embryonic stem cell research. But few people (at least those who aren’t familiar with him or his work) understand how scientifically and ethically confused he is on this issue.

For instance, in a recent New Yorker profile , Collins claims to be unclear about when life begins:

Before Collins had a direct say in the Administration’s decision on stem cells, he was personally torn by the ethical questions posed by stem-cell research. He has long opposed the creation of embryos for the purpose of research. He sees a human embryo as a potential life, though he thinks that it is not possible scientifically to settle precisely when life begins.

Does Collins really believe that a human embryo is only a “potential life?” It’s hard to believe that such a brilliant scientist could be completely ignorant about such a basic scientific concept. After all, the issue really isn’t that controversial. Some may argue that it occurs before syngamy (the process of cellular union during fertilization) or soon after. But it is empirically verifiable that an embryo has meets the standard criteria for “when life begins.”

For example, here is how one scientist answered the question, “What do you think a living thing would require to be alive?”

The word “living” has so many connotations that I’m almost reluctant to try to define it scientifically because it sounds as if I’m then downgrading all the other significances of that word. But if you wanted a short list of the properties of something that we would call living:

It would need to be self-replicating, that is, it could copy itself stably into many other copies. It would need to be stable over time. And it would need to be able to survive without the input of lots of other complicated proteins or other large molecules that aren’t generally available, floating around in the atmosphere. Sure, it could have some sort of media that it lived in, some sugars and some salts, and things like that. But let’s not require it to need cytochrome P450.

The human embryo, of course, meets all these criteria. Does Collins disagree with this definition of life? If so then he is disagreeing with himself: The quote above is from an interview with Collins in 2005 .

Perhaps the earlier, pre-politicized Collins should give a science lesson to himself about the difference between a living being and “potential life.”

Update: Justin Taylor pointed out an article from Public Discourse that I had forgotten about. Back in January, Justin D. Barnard wrote :

In a section of the appendix entitled, “Somatic Cell Nuclear Transfer is Fundamentally Different,” Collins argues that human “products” of SCNT are (or would be) fundamentally different from human embryos created with egg and sperm. So he concludes that while so-called “reproductive cloning” ought to be prohibited, “therapeutic cloning” represents the way forward. Collins writes, “I would argue that the immediate product of a skin cell and an enucleated egg cell fall short of the moral status of the union of sperm and egg” (pg. 256). The trouble with this view is that the “immediate product” of successful SCNT, just like the “immediate product” of the successful union of sperm and egg, is an embryonic member of the species. In the case of a human being, the embryo, whatever its origins, will, if permitted to live, develop by an internally directed process from the embryonic stage into and through the fetal, infant, child, and adolescent stages, and ultimately into adulthood. A cloned human embryo, no less than a human embryo produced by the union of gametes, is an embryonic human. That is a matter of biological fact that Collins conveniently shuffles off stage. The moral implications are clear, and clearly contradict Collins’ conclusion: the embryo produced by cloning enjoys the same moral status, whatever one judges that to be, as the embryo produced the old-fashioned way.

Notice that this directly contradicts the claim in the New Yorker article that Collins “has long opposed the creation of embryos for the purpose of research.” That is what “therapeutic cloning” means. The difference between therapeutic and reproductive cloning is that in the former the embryo is killed and in the latter it is implanted into a woman’s uterus so that it may live. Does Collins not understand what SCNT is either?