PX science.qxp
23/11/2006
86
22:29
Page 86
science vs superstition
tionable and reprehensible if one accepted the arguments against research which this is supposed to support. The legal philosopher Reinhard Merkel illustrates this problem with a historical example. About a hundred years ago one of the arguments against giving women the right to vote was “If we do this, then where will it end?” Some people feared that voting women would soon demand the right to be elected and to become ministers or even heads of state. Merkel thinks that the putative dangers which are feared by opponents of stem cell research today represent thoroughly positive developments, in much the same way that the emancipation of women was a thoroughly positive benefit that developed from the top of the slope on which women were first given the vote. Allowing embryonic research may well be the first step – which we should better view as a step forward rather than a tumble down a slope – towards the development of therapeutic cloning. In opposition to therapeutic cloning we find the argument that it involves the production of embryos (understood in the argument as people) for research purposes and that this is very clearly reprehensible.The moral force of this argument is again derived from the equation of embryos with people and the attribution of equal moral status to each. But there is a further step which the opponents wish to take use down this slippery slope: the claim that therapeutic cloning paves the way for reproductive cloning. While therapeutic cloning and reproductive cloning share the same first step – inserting genetic material from the cell of one patient into a donated egg cell which is then activated and begins to divide – they have completely different motivations. As in the case of in-vitro-fertilization the result of the first step is a blastocyte from which stem cells can be gained.These stem cells have the great advantage that they have the same genome as their intended host, because they have been generated from her donated cell. It is easy to determine a legal distinction between such cloning for therapeutic purposes and cloning for reproductive purposes. The structure of law depends precisely upon our capacity to define, to prohibit,