To understand stem cell debate, we must start with fundamental rights

ARE people with disabilities being manipulated in the embryo research debate?

Last Friday also brought us an Irish Times headline which read 'Cloning advances bring hope of curing diseases'.

On the same day in the London Independent (and subsequently in the Sunday Tribune) Johann Hari was exultant: "The news from South Korea should be greeted by all rational human beings as a cue to glug champagne and hug children," he gushed. "Today victims of Parkinson's, diabetes and Alzheimer's can feel a shaft of hope."

Can they? The truth is that nobody yet knows the implications of what the South Korean scientists have done.

Yes, they have managed to obtain stem cells from a cloned human embryo. But there's a long way to go before this translates into cures for disease. As UCC Associate Professor of Biochemistry William Reville wrote recently: "We are talking at this stage only of potential.

"Much research must be done before we know for sure how useful stem cells can be in human medicine and it is unlikely that major advances will occur in the near future."

Our bodies have trillions of cells, most of which are differentiated into different kinds of tissue. Stem cells are more basic undifferentiated cells which have potential to develop into different types of body tissue for medical treatment.

Cloning involves taking things a step further.

Scientists put the nucleus of an adult cell into a female egg. They stimulate it to develop into an embryo which is a copy of the adult cell donor.

This cloning can be therapeutic whereby the embryo used to harvest stem cells is then destroyed.

On the other hand, it could be reproductive, which would involve the cloned embryo being implanted and possibly brought to birth. Brave new world.

The controversy rages over whether we should source stem cells from human embryos, cloned or otherwise.

Some scientists want to do this even though it destroys the embryo because they believe embryonic stem cells are more flexible. Other scientists argue that the ethical minefield may not be necessary.

"The potential of stem cells to alleviate human misery is great," says William Reville, "but their potential is probably realisable through research on adult stem cells." This idea of using stem cells taken from the body is supported by those who regard the human embryo as a human being at a very early stage of development. The embryo should not be plundered, they say, even for medical cure.

However, disability and disease are presented as the unstoppable argument for allowing scientists to proceed with embryo research. One of the cheerleaders is Christopher Reeve, the former Superman actor who wants a cure for his spinal injury. Other disability activists disagree with Reeve. For example, Erik Leipoldt, Christopher Newell and Maurice Corcoran, all of whom have lived through the trauma of acquired disability.

"As people with acquired mobility impairment two of us with quadriplegia we know only too well the stark contrasts between life with and without disability," they say. "But what lengths should we, as individuals and as a society, go through on a quest for the Holy Grail of normality?

"It concerns us greatly that the embryonic stem cell research lobby appears to be using the public's innate fears of disability, and people with disabilities, for its own ends."

These writers do not reject ethically uncontroversial cures for their illness. But they argue that society must accept fragility as part of the human condition and work to remove the more practical problems faced by those with disability such as inadequate support services, dehumanising institutions, high levels of unemployment and exclusion from regular education.

"A predominant medical view of their condition makes people with disabilities vulnerable to a cure-or-death ethic," they warn.

Their concerns invite us to question the ethics of trumpeting cloning and embryo research as the cure-all for disability whether in newspaper headlines or the pages of scientific journals. But some people in the scientific community are not for turning. They want to quieten our ethical concerns. And disability is a powerful emotive argument.

Last week RTÉ's Pat Kenny interviewed Professor Sir John Sulston, a British scientist and Nobel laureate. Sulston called for a worldwide ban on human reproductive cloning. But while this may make his position look very moral, the reality is that some scientists want reproductive as well as therapeutic cloning.

SOME would argue for the right to implant cloned embryos and thereby begin a pregnancy. This would enable them to grow a compatible organ or tissue which could be 'harvested' by aborting the unborn child. The line between therapy and reproduction is blurring already.

Sulston wasn't asked by Pat Kenny if he would support such a procedure. But it is interesting that he referred to the British abortion law to support his view that life doesn't begin at conception.

"Abortion is available for a pretty wide range of requirements... we believe that human life begins slowly... it seems to me perfectly obvious that a fertilised egg is not a human being... it just has the potential to be human being"

Sulston told Pat Kenny that we should apply a "progressive moral standard" according to the stage of development of the embryo. We shouldn't "appeal to rules that come out of some external dogma" but rather "what we see with our senses".

This view was echoed by Johann Hari who ridiculed those who would respect the human embryo as Monty Python, 'every sperm is sacred', types. "For them, this is murder. From the second a sperm and egg meet, there is a complete human being with a God-given soul."

This is disingenuous. To characterise those who believe life begins at conception as fearful, fundamentalist types is to deny what science makes obvious. When sperm meets egg you have a unique combination of human data capable in the right conditions of growing to be a mature human being.

This is not an argument based on the existence of a soul. Ironically, many of those who posit a 'progressive moral standard' are unwilling to give us an alternative view of when life begins. They are unable to tell us what precise event other than conception allows them to distinguish between lives which must be respected and those which need not.

In fact, it is Sulston, Hari and Co who are being irrational whether by denying the singular nature of human conception, using the cause of people with disabilities to manipulate support for embryo research, or making decisions about human life on the basis of whether the embryo 'looks like' a human person.

What is more rational is to regard the embryo as having full human capacity for its stage of development.

As William Reville puts it, "it has the rights appropriate to its developmental stage".

The most basic human right is the right to life and other rights are meaningless without it.