The issue could not be resolved by considering how many gravely ill non-retarded people could be saved by extracting a heart, two kidneys, and a liver from each retarded child. If we were to contemplate killing mentally retarded infants to obtain transplantable organs, no one would characterize the resulting controversy as a debate “about organ transplantation.” The dispute would properly be characterized as a debate about the ethics of killing retarded children to harvest their vital organs. Absent the appropriate framing of the issue, there is little likelihood of generating an illuminating public discussion. Part of the problem we face is the way the issue has been framed by the editors of the New England Journal of Medicine and many others who have waded into the debate. In his view, human embryos, whether produced by union of sperm and egg or by somatic cell nuclear transfer, are not entitled to the moral immunity against direct attack that is enjoyed by human beings at later developmental stages. Michael Sandel, a professor of political theory at Harvard University, defended the killing of human embryos in biomedical research without regard to the method by which such embryos are brought into being.
These “clonotes,” McHugh argued, may be legitimately destroyed for purposes of stem cell harvesting, so long as they are destroyed before the fourteenth day of their development. He argued that human “clonotes” are not really human embryos, and thus do not enjoy the high moral status of embryos brought into being by ordinary sexual intercourse or by the process of in vitro fertilization (IVF).
Paul McHugh, a professor of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University, explained his opposition to the destruction of human embryos created by the union of gametes, but sought to distinguish such embryos from what he dubbed “clonotes”: that is, embryos brought into being by cloning (a process known technically as “somatic cell nuclear transfer” or SCNT). The prestigious New England Journal of Medicine ( NEJM) recently invited two members of the President’s Council on Bioethics to reflect on the ethics of using embryonic stem cells in biomedical research.
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