President Obama announced last Wednesday his pick of Francis Collins, former director of the Human Genome Project and an evangelical Christian, to lead the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the government's biomedical research wing. While a couple news reports have highlighted onlookers' hesitation over Collins's faith, few have examined Collins's views on embryonic stem-cell research, for which President Obama lifted by executive order a ban on federal funding this March.
So what exactly are Collins's views on the ethics of embryonic stem-cell research and when life begins? Below are some comments he has made on the matter in the last few years. See what you can parse out:
In a 2006 interview with Steve Paulson of Salon:
Paulson: Geneticists are sometimes accused of "playing God," especially when it comes to genetic engineering. And there are various thorny bioethical issues. What's your position on stem cell research?
Collins: Stem cells have been discussed for 10 years, and yet I fear that much of that discussion has been more heat than light. First of all, I believe that the product of a sperm and an egg, which is the first cell that goes on to develop a human being, deserves considerable moral consequences. This is an entity that ultimately becomes a human. So I would be opposed to the idea of creating embryos by mixing sperm and eggs together and then experimenting on the outcome of that, purely to understand research questions.
On the other hand, there are hundreds of thousands of such embryos in freezers at in vitro fertilization clinics. In the process of in vitro fertilization, you almost invariably end up with more embryos than you can reimplant safely. The plausibility of those ever being reimplanted in the future – more than a few of them – is extremely low. Is it more ethical to leave them in those freezers forever or throw them away? Or is it more ethical to come up with some sort of use for those embryos that could help people? I think that's not been widely discussed.
In a 2006 interview with Steve Paulson of Salon:
Paulson: Geneticists are sometimes accused of "playing God," especially when it comes to genetic engineering. And there are various thorny bioethical issues. What's your position on stem cell research?
Collins: Stem cells have been discussed for 10 years, and yet I fear that much of that discussion has been more heat than light. First of all, I believe that the product of a sperm and an egg, which is the first cell that goes on to develop a human being, deserves considerable moral consequences. This is an entity that ultimately becomes a human. So I would be opposed to the idea of creating embryos by mixing sperm and eggs together and then experimenting on the outcome of that, purely to understand research questions.
On the other hand, there are hundreds of thousands of such embryos in freezers at in vitro fertilization clinics. In the process of in vitro fertilization, you almost invariably end up with more embryos than you can reimplant safely. The plausibility of those ever being reimplanted in the future – more than a few of them – is extremely low. Is it more ethical to leave them in those freezers forever or throw them away? Or is it more ethical to come up with some sort of use for those embryos that could help people? I think that's not been widely discussed.
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Justin Barnard, philosophy professor at Union University, this morning provided a helpful critique of what he sees as Collins's ambiguity about embryonic stem-cell research. The day before Collins was picked, the NIH updated its guidelines for how federal funding can be used for stem-cell research: While NIH funds cannot be used to directly derive stem cells from human embryos, thus destroying them, they can now be used to conduct research on stem cell lines that have already been derived from destroyed human embryos.
Barnard explains why this is problematic: "In effect, the new guidelines provide an incentive to private research entities to obtain so-called 'leftover' embryos from fertility clinics and derive stem cell lines from them in order to obtain NIH research dollars to study the derived lines." He goes on to say this is "effectively outsourcing the destruction of human life."
He ends by asking Collins to "come clean. Either he upholds the dignity of human life or he doesn't. If he does, and he accepts the nomination to head the NIH, then it seems that he is deeply compromised as a professing evangelical Christian. If he does not, then the evangelical community needs to know."
What do you think? Can Collins still be considered a "professing evangelical Christian" while supporting stem-cell research on embryos that are stored at in vitro fertilization clinics and would otherwise be discarded?
