But if it is never going to become a human - and we know this, to start with; that's why it's used - then is it human? Can it even be considered to have human potential since we know that there is no potential?
You call it a human organism... human life at a primitive stage; I would see a more accurate description as 'tissue cultivated from human cells'. Given the appropriate treatment, now, we could enable it to become a human being.
But 50 years ago it would have been dead cells, no more: and 50 years from now, any cells taken from a living human might be usable to recreate living human tissue, or even a new human being - so should we then revert to the Middle Ages prohibition on all anatomical research, or take the Jehovah's Witness ban on surgery, because the tissue removed could be made into a new human being? The potential is defined by our scientific advance, and removed by the same.
I can see your point, but I disagree - I don't acknowledge that a grouping of selected human cells, joined in a lab dish and kept reproducing to a certain point by nutrient culture, which will never become a human, is necessarily to be defined as 'human life'. Respect it, perhaps, for that never-to-be-achieved potential, and create, study and use it as necessary, not at whim (alas, it will inevitably be for profit: and grown and harvested, as any other artificial crop... - is this the fear behind your ethics?); but it is not nor will ever be human. |
