Christians Challenge Ethics as Scientists Create Stem Cell from Dead Embryo

The Prince Felipe Research Centre in Spain has claimed that scientists have created an entire stem cell from a dead embryo, according to a medical journal.

A research team has joined up with Dr Donald Landry, the US scientist who first suggested that dead embryos could be used to create embryonic stem cells. Together they have suggested that this would be an ethical alternative to purposefully 'killing' embryos for research.

Dr Landry has said, "Regardless of how you feel about personhood for embryos, if the embryo is dead then the issue of personhood is resolved."

"This then reduces the ethics of human embryonic stem cell generation to the ethics of, say, organ donation."

However, the Director of the Catholic-run Linacre Centre for Healthcare Ethics in London, Dr Helen Watt, has responded by saying that the new direction was still encircled by an ethical minefield.

Dr Watt said, "There was no intention that any survive.

"To claim that, because some died (or may have died) naturally before they could be killed in research, hardly shows that the experiment was justified.

"The authors of the paper go on to suggest that we might create embryos by cloning and experiment on those that died naturally, as well as on the others. If the aim in waiting for natural death - or what we guess is natural death - is to satisfy legal or political concerns, the death of these embryos may even be intended, not merely foreseen.

"In any case, IVF itself raises very serious moral concerns for the Catholic Church. The way in which IVF embryos are graded for quality, abandoned by their parents and discarded or used in experiments witnesses powerfully to the fact that lives created like products tend to be treated like products.

"Use of IVF embryos - even dead embryos - would normally involve close complicity with IVF practitioners, of a kind which could not be justified. It might well encourage the mass-creation of IVF embryos, at a time when fewer embryos are being created in IVF, due to concerns for women's health," she said according to the Catholic publication 'The Universe'.

Matthew O'Gorman, spokesman for pro-life group 'LIFE' added: "It is encouraging that many embryo researchers are concerning themselves with attempting to overcome the ethical objections made by pro-life groups.

"However, experimentation on dead embryos is always going to be predicated upon the manufacture of human life through IVF. Embryo researchers need to understand clearly that the creation of life outside of the womb is in itself deeply morally problematic," he concluded, according to The Universe.