We Must Not Turn Humans
Into Commodities

By Barbara Quigley

The most troubling aspect of the current Missouri stem cell ballot initiative is not the wholesale destruction of human embryos, terrible as this is, but the commodification of human life - turning human beings into “things.”

And human embryos - massed produced copies of existing human beings created through cloning (aka somatic cell nuclear transfer or SCNT) - aren’t the only ones who will be commodified. Healthy young women, the source of the eggs necessary for the cloning procedure, will be asked to “donate” at some risk to their health and perhaps even their future fertility, their bodies mined for one of the components vital to the production of the cloned human embryos used in embryonic stem cell research.

Likewise, Ian Wilmut, best known as creator of the first cloned mammal Dolly the sheep, proposed conducting embryonic stem cell therapy trials on dying people rather than animals - another group of human beings to be turned into research tools.

This phenomenon is not new. For 40 years (1932-1973) U.S. scientists subjected African-American men in Tuskegee, AL to the effects of advanced syphilis, even though effective treatment was available, in order to study the effects on the human body. In 1963 chronically ill patients were injected with live human cancer cells without being informed. From 1963-1966 mentally retarded children living in the Willowbrook State School in New York were deliberately infected with hepatitis virus to study the course of the disease. In 1999, 18-year-old Jesse Gelsinger died while a participant in a gene therapy study and in 2001 a healthy 24 year old female died in an allergy experiment -both studies did not offer participants adequate information regarding risks. In 2004, HIV positive children in New York City’s welfare system were used in experimental AIDS drug trials. All of these examples (there are more) occurred after the research abuses and extermination of millions of Jews and other undesirables during WW II and the adoption of the Nuremberg Code, a code designed to protect human beings from harmful scientific research.

While the creation and destruction of human embryos for use in embryonic stem cell research is terrible indeed, we must also be conscious of a greater and more subtle danger, and resist human commodification wherever it occurs.

Barbara Quigley is the Executive Director of the St. Louis Center for Bioethics & Culture which informs and equips laypeople, clergy, and medical professionals on the bioethics issues which face us today. For more information call (636) 207-7540 or visit their web site at www.stlcbc.com.