I hear that the villain in Dan Brown’s new novel, Inferno, is a Malthusian transhumanist. Brown isn’t the first to use fiction to explore the potential downside of the transhumanist movement. The Frankenstein series by my pal Dean Koontz, for example, is all about transhumanism — as indeed, when you think about it, was Mary Shelly’s original. The great Star Trek villain Kahn was the creation of transhumanist genetic engineering gone bad. And of course, Huxley’s immortal (pun intended) Brave New World is the classic of the genre.

Transhumanists aren’t malignly motivated. But the movement’s ideological heart is vividly Utopian and its theories steeped in eugenic anti-human exceptionalism. That kind of thinking always leads to trouble, which is why transhumanists makes great fiction fodder.

I keep saying that if you want to see what the USA will look like in ten years under Obamacare, just look at the mess that calls itself the National Health Service in the UK. It isn’t that the NHS is socialized medicine per se — although that is part of it. More importantly in my view, the NHS has a sclerotic and bureaucratic top-down approach to healthcare that deprofessionalizes medicine by dictating treatment protocols from on high.

Now, a columnist in the left wing Guardian notes that disabled people face deadly discrimination in NHS hospitals. From, “The NHS is Killing Disabled People:”

Each week 24 disabled people are killed by such prejudiced presumptions; indeed, there was a case at my local hospital recently. These shocking figures are based on a government-commissioned inquiry into one region of the country, which found people with disabilities 37% more likely to be killed by incompetence or inadequate care — and their lives end on average 16 years earlier than they should. The more serious the disabilities, the higher the risk.

Forgive me if I fail to join the national worship of the NHS. Mencap has been campaigning to prevent these deaths, logging at least 100 cases over the past six years. The charity blames poor communication with parents and carers as the main cause — but it has concluded that the only explanation for so many preventable deaths is prejudice. Doctors and nurses reflect views prevalent across society that people with profound disabilities are second-class citizens, their lives not worth saving. Imagine the furore if any other minority group was dying in such numbers.

Disabled people always face hurdles in being treated as fully equal. It is a consequence of rejecting human exceptionalism.

But medical discrimination involves more than a discriminatory cultural default setting. The NHS explicitly controls costs through a “quality of life” rationing system, dictated by NICE — the misnamed National Institute of Clinical and Health Excellence. With quality of life judgmentalism in the bone marrow of the system, we can hardly be surprised that those deemed to have a lower quality of life — and who happen to be more expensive to care for — end up on the short end of the stethoscope.

Obamacare will institute the same kind of quality of life rationing, over time, here in the USA. Indeed, many among the medical intelligentsia and other architects of Obamacare are all for it as a way of controlling costs — including the New England Journal of Medicine.

Thanks to Brendan P. Foht, over at The Corner, for showing that it was misleading to claim that SCNT human cloning could not lead to a human pregnancy because there have been no successful cloned monkey pregnancies. But there have been cloned monkey pregnancies, with one embryo developing to the fetal stage with a heartbeat! From the 2010 article in the International Journal of Biological Development:

At present, the production of live primate offspring following SCNT has yet to be accomplished (Mitalipov et al., 2002; Simerly et al., 2003). We summarize here our recent unpublished efforts in embryo transfer using rhesus blastocysts produced by SCNT with adult monkey skin cells expressing GFP (Table 3). A total of 5 pregnancies were established following transfer of 67 embryos into 10 recipients (Tables 3 and 4). Only one pregnancy resulted in a live fetus that possessed a fetal heartbeat, detected by ultrasonographic scans, while other pregnancies contained sacs without a fetus (Fig. 2). Unfortunately, this pregnancy failed to go to term and was aborted at day 81 of gestation.

The same early difficulties were experienced by researchers in cloning other mammals. But starting with Dolly, difficulties bringing a cloned fetus to birth were eventually overcome.

Bottom line: Monkeys have been impregnated successfully with cloned embryos, resulting in some gestational success. The rest is simply a matter of technique. Eventually, a cloned monkey infant will almost certainly be born. The very research now being conducted in human cloning is a required step toward attaining that same potential end with us.

Vermont has legalized assisted suicide, and hospitals in the state are delaying implementation on premises. From the AP story:

Vermont’s new aid-in-dying law, which allows doctors to prescribe lethal medication to terminally ill patients who request it, is set to take effect as soon as Gov. Peter Shumlin signs it on Monday. But most Vermont hospitals are expected, at least for the time being, to opt out of implementing it. Vermont Association of Hospitals and Health Systems. Olson said her group is advising hospitals to take their time to develop policies for how to handle aid-in-dying on their properties and among their medical staffs. “There’s a lot of work to do to get ready to do it,” she said.

Actually, they should establish a fixed policy quickly: Never in our hospital! That’s worked in Washington, for example, where some declared policies of non cooperation.

More: Since the odious law allows hospitals, nursing homes, doctors etc., to refuse participation, they should do just that. Indeed, rather than help kill, doctors and hospitals should post copies of the Hippocratic Oath in their waiting rooms and publicly declare their practice or facility to be an “assisted suicide free zone.” It would set a great public example by proclaiming loudly that killing is not medicine. And it would reduce the number of assisted suicides.

Dear Friend of the CBC,

As you may know, I serve as chair of the board of directors of The CBC. During the day I practice general surgery in Manhattan . . . Kansas. We call ourselves the Little Apple. We even have a ball drop on New Year’s Eve.

I have had the honor of helping support this organization from almost the beginning. I got to know Jennifer Lahl when we started our master’s studies together at Trinity University in Chicago. As part of her major project for graduation, she decided to start a bioethics center. When she told me about the work she felt called to do, I agreed to help provide some support to get things going. At the time, I thought it would run for two or three years and then probably fade away. I hoped that it would be successful in the same way that I hope a major operation is successful when I work on someone with a massively bleeding ulcer, a bad heart, and kidney failure.

Shortly after that, she asked me to be a member of the board. Once again I said “sure” because she’s a good friend, because I respected what she was doing, and because I wanted to help. I figured there would be a few meetings and no significant intellectual heavy lifting.

My prognostication skills are obviously lacking. Sometimes the patient survives in spite of my best surgical efforts. The CBC has survived and grown for 13 years, with your help. For that I thank you.

But why do I support the CBC? Like many of you, I receive letters and calls to support numerous organizations on a weekly basis. Many of them are good and worthy causes and make a compelling case for their mission. Why the CBC?

I’d like to tell the story of a friend of mine who is on faculty in the animal science department at my local university, Kansas State University. Being a land-grant university, K-State has strong emphases in agriculture and related areas. My friend’s specialty is reproductive physiology, working in assisted reproduction in cattle.

In 2001, our local and state news broke the story of “Baby Doe,” the first cloned calf the university produced. My friend was one of the researchers on the project and was featured in interviews throughout the week. He called me a couple of weeks later wanting to get together for coffee and discuss some of the ethics around cloning. He told me he’d been thinking about what his team had done and now he wasn’t so sure he had done a good thing.

I of course said I’d be happy to talk to him but felt compelled to remind him that the best time to think about whether you’ve done the right thing or not is before you do it, not after.

We want the coed on the college campus to think about the implications of what she might be doing before she answers the ad in the campus newspaper or on Craigslist for an egg donor.

We want the struggling single mom to think about what is really involved before she agrees to be a surrogate mother carrying a baby for someone else.

We want the voters and the politicians to think about the implications of assisted suicide and euthanasia before they vote to legalize it.

We want to speak for and defend the dignity of those who are most vulnerable and voiceless in society, whether it be the unborn, the disabled or the dying.

The CBC has made significant inroads through film and media to bring the stories of the vulnerable to audiences that would not otherwise hear them. The films—Anonymous Father’s Day, Eggsploitation, and Lines that Divide—have shown on major college campuses, at Ivy League law schools, at independent film festivals, and in movie theaters. They have also shown in Europe at colleges and international conferences, and the videos have been sold and shipped all over the world.

We have seen the profound impact that the power of a human story can have. Most of us hear facts and figures throughout the day. And while the CBC can and does make logical arguments for the positions we take, what really reaches people is the story of someone like them who has walked the path before them. The stories they will remember.

We are asking people to partner with us in our mission to carry the call of human dignity into society. It is only with the help of those partnering with us that we can do the things that we do.

Your partnership can make a significant difference to the future of us all. We are not a large organization with a multi-million dollar budget. Heck, we don’t even have a million dollar budget. That’s why your gift, whether it be with time, talent, or treasure can make such a big difference in the CBC’s ability to reach further into the culture and give a voice to human dignity, a voice that values people simply for the fact that they are human beings and not just for what they can contribute.

Which brings me back to the original question: “What the CBC means to me.” Very simply, I care about people. That’s part of why I am a physician. I care about human dignity, because I think there is more to being human than proteins and DNA.

Historically, we’ve seen the results of what happens to societies that consider certain populations and groups as less than human, not possessing human dignity. I’m concerned that our culture is going down that path.

The CBC exists to defend the dignity of every human. Like the old Sunday School song says, “Red and yellow, black and white, they are precious in his sight.” That’s why I support the CBC. That’s what the CBC means to me.

Thank you very much and God bless.
  
David Pauls, MD FACS

Your generous and timely gift is tax deductible.

PS: Your partnership now will make a significant difference to the future of us all.

I learned about the first successful human cloning last Monday, but couldn’t write about it until Wednesday because of a news embargo. The peer reviewed paper in Cell was rushed to print because is a huge deal. But, much to my surprise, it only made mild news. There were two reasons for that I think. First, we just went through a very busy news week. But I think the primary reason is that the scientists and media pretended that this wasn’t really human cloning for political reasons; just a step in that general direction.

But human cloning it was, and that is a huge deal, opening up the possibility of genetic engineering of embryos, creating custom made fetuses as organ farms, and the birth of a cloned baby. News stories often acted as if the experiment merely turned “unfertilized eggs” and skin cells into embryonic stem cells. Not true: The act of cloning creates an embryo. After that, the cloning is over.

Just like Dolly the cloned sheep was a cloned sheep embryo before she was a born lamb, these human embryos were nascent human beings created through asexual means. They were not implanted into a uterus, as Dolly’s embryo was, but destroyed for their stem cells. Indeed, they were created precisely to be destroyed. That is a very big moral deal.

Even though it is off to a slow start due to advocacy obfuscation, the reality of human cloning will soon create white-hot public controversies, a few of which I discuss elsewhere. These include:

• Whether Human SCNT Cloning should be outlawed;
• Whether the federal government should fund human cloning research;
• How — and whether — to protect women from being exploited for their eggs — the essential ingredient in human cloning, one egg per try — since egg extraction can cause significant harm and even death to suppliers.

I conclude with a warning. From, “The Arrival of Human Cloning:”

The fact that human beings can be cloned is a scientific triumph, but it is also an ethical earthquake. Because these experiments offer the potential to advance scientific knowledge, they will tempt us — always for “the best” reasons — to set aside our convictions about the intrinsic dignity of all human life.

The next decade may well decide if Huxley was right about the coming of Brave New World.

The Los Angeles Times has waded in to the junk biology game, assuring us that no embryos are threatened in human cloning — WHEN THE WHOLE POINT OF HUMAN CLONING IS TO CREATE AN EMBRYO! From the editorial, “The Specter of Human Cloning:”

The team at OHSU, which disclosed its work in a paper published online by Cell, created embryonic stem cells by replacing the nucleus in an unfertilized human egg with the nucleus from a skin cell, then harvesting the resulting stem cells. This long-sought technique may eventually let doctors create replacement cells for a wide variety of tissues from bits of a patient’s own skin. One advantage to this approach is that, unlike much of the initial work on stem cells, it doesn’t require the destruction of human embryos. That practice drew fierce opposition from some religious leaders and right-to-life groups, although their criticism has faded as researchers switched to adult stem cells and, more recently, regular cells reprogrammed into stem cells through genetic engineering.

Some critics continue to argue that it’s unethical to manipulate the genetic makeup of human eggs even if they’re unfertilized, and others warn about potential harm to egg donors. The biggest ethical issue for the OHSU team, though, is that it artificially created a human embryo, albeit one that was missing the components needed for implantation and development as a fetus.

So it isn’t an embryo, but it is?

Pay close attention: Dolly came from an “unfertilized egg” and became a sheep. Before that, she was a sheep embryo and a sheep fetus. The act of cloning does not get the egg to create stem cells, it produces an embryo. After that, the cloning is over and the question becomes what to do with the embryo, NOT WHAT TO DO WITH THE UNFERTILIZED EGG!

As to the question of reproductive cloning: The researchers haven’t tried to bring a human baby to birth. They note that they have also not been able yet to bring a cloned monkey embryo to birth. That doesn’t mean they won’t. It’s all just a matter of technology now. Indeed, until lately, you couldn’t make human cloned embryos. Now scientists can.

The Times argues in favor of a ban on reproductive cloning, but permitting research cloning to proceed:

Still, the federal government needs to set rules that would stop researchers in this country from crossing the line between generating stem cells and trying to bring a cloned embryo to life. Adding a clear prohibition would help assure the public that stem cell research should be embraced, not feared.

AAUGH! The cloned embryo is already alive!

Here’s the strategy: Big Biotech is always willing to prohibit that which they cannot yet do. But they want authority to conduct the research they can do, which will eventually lead to being able to do what they can’t, at which point the prohibition is revoked because now “society is ready.”

Bottom line: If you want to prevent the eventual birth of a cloned human baby, the only way to do that is prohibit human SCNT.