Politicizing Science: How the UK Became Brave New Britain
Please pardon this lengthy post, but in light of our recent conversations about the organismic status of the early embryo as biological human life, I thought it was worth discussing how and why the term came to be redefined to exclude early embryos from membership in the human race.
The story is recounted in a paper called, "The Triumph of the Pre-Embryo: Interpretations of the Human Embryo in Parliamentary Debate Over Embryo Research," published in Social Studies of Science, Vol. 24, No. 4 (Nov., 1994, 611-639). It takes place in the UK, and it explains how the the country devolved between 1984 and 1990 into Brave New Britain. More to the point, this sad saga illustrates vividly the power of inaccurate words to change moral perceptions--or at least provide a political rationalization for doing so. In fact, the ongoing and accelerating collapse in scientific and medical ethics in the UK (and elsewhere) came about by the adoption of simple rhetorical pretense--that a human embryo isn't really an embryo.
We begin in 1982, when, in the wake of the birth of the first "test tube baby," the UK government set up the "Warnock Committee" to explore the ethical implications of this new technology. Choosing the crass utilitarian Baroness Mary Warnock to head the committee resulted in a predictable recommendation. From the paper (here's the link to the abstract):
[T]he Committee [in a divided vote] recommended that permission should be given for embryos to be reduced for, and to be used for, research up to the end of the first 14 days after fertilization.Me: This was a deeply cynical tactic that has become a standard practice of the politicized science sector: Agree to prohibit only that which cannot now be done. Embryos can't be maintained out of a gestational environment beyond 14 days. Thus, the Committee's proposed ethical line in the ethical sand was utterly meaningless. It wasn't designed to actually protect any embryo, just give the appearance of restraint and control.
Back to the history: Warnock made one mistake: Her committee called an embryo, an embryo. Thus, when the issue was debated in Parliament in 1984, a political firestorm developed. Back then, it was undisputed that an embryo was a nascent human being. The principle of human exceptionalism and the sanctity/equality of human life still had heft. The public did not believe that human beings, even at the nascent stage, should be treated so crassly. The outcome was a route, with 51% of Labour and 88% of Conservative MPs voting for a total prohibition of embryo research.
Alas, that did not end the matter. As we have experienced in the ESCR/human cloning research debates of this era, the scientific establishment organized politically to push for embryo experimentation. Only six years later it obtained all that it wanted; a license to conduct embryo experimentation. Ever since, the UK never says no to "the scientists."
How did this happen? By creating the myth that nascent human beings are not human life at all:
Almost two years after the Warnock Report, Anne McLaren, the single embryologist on the Warnock Committee, wrote to Nature [arguing] "the embryo doesn't exist for the first two weeks after fertilization." What exists during this period is not an embryo, she claims, but "a mass of cells generated by the fertilized egg. Only after the first 14 days, she states elsewhere, "can individual embryonic development be said to begin."This is biological nonsense, of course. But the point wasn't to provide the politicians and the public with accurate science from which to engage in rational analysis. It was to skew the politics and stack the deck in order to achieve a desired outcome. A pseudo scientific term was coined to carry the weight of this junk biology--and the "pre embryo" entered the lexicon.
That gave parliamentarians who wanted to authorize the research an excuse to do so. Human embryos were, suddenly, no longer human:
The spread of the term "pre-embryo" helped to resolve the moral problem of embryo research by convincing people and/or by enabling them to express their conviction that this was not, after all, research on human beings, but experimental use of an unformed, albeit human, bio mass.This junk biology continues to dominate our ethics to this day--now justifying ESCR, therapeutic cloning, and eugenic manipulations on early embryos before implantation.
The Orwellian invention of the non scientific term "pre embryo" was a triumph of propagandist politics over scientific integrity. Worse, it introduced a cancer into the science sector that has subverted it ever since. Today, science often isn't science at all: It is ideological advocacy, with definitions changed almost at will to promote desired policy agendas and political outcomes. As the cancer spreads, broader areas of societal integrity have been undermined and rational democratic debate has been subverted. Indeed, anyone who trusts what "the scientists" tell us today just because they are scientists, hasn't been paying attention.
Labels: Politicized Science. The Warnock Committee. Pre Embryo.
posted by Wesley J. Smith @ 8:58 AM
3 Comments
3 Comments:
Great, appreciated, and important post Wesley.
I’ve long had an awareness of rhetoric, but was never as sensitive to it as I am in this day and age.
I think perhaps another major/related 'word out for trial' is “fertilization.”
If you watched a fairly recent tape of Larry King, the Bill Clinton/ Sonja Gupta interview, (soon after Obama lifted the ban on ESC funding), it was pretty obvious.
Clinton was asked about Obama’s decision, and he must have said close to 10 times, the word “fertilized”, informing us out here in dumb down land, that “no problem doing ESR UNLESS the embryo is “fertilized.”
I doubt this was a mistake, but more of a trial balloon.
Clinton is a Rhode Scholar, Gupta a brain surgeon, consequently one would have a hard time convincing me that not one but both of them didn’t know biology 101. Part of me was waiting for Gupta to correct Clinton, telling him that ALL embryos are fertilized, but he never even looked like he WANTED to correct him. After all, what influential person is better at word play than Bill Clinton? (Clip is easily found on YouTube or the transcript on King’s website).
Also wanted to bring this link to the attention of anyone interested. It the trial transcript of world famous French geneticist, Dr. Jerome LeJeune, discoverer of Trisomy 21 (Down’s Syndrome). He had such respect for human life he came to the US on his own dime for one of the first custody battles over frozen embryos (as an expert witness).
This transcript is now 20 years old, and the scientific evidence back then was jaw dropping. Scientifically we’ve come about 1000 fold since that time, which makes his testimony all that more compelling.
http://www.sedin.org/propeng/embryos.htm
I watched that clip and assumed Clinton was just being stupid. But then, I have to admit that I have always said myself that Clinton is _not_ stupid. I said it during his entire presidency. Dangerous, but not stupid. So maybe I was being too charitable.
Excellent, Wesley! It is unfortunate that most people do not understand the political history behind the “pre-embryo” and those associated with it. As you know, I was a member of the first formal bioethics graduate student class at the Kennedy Institute of Ethics at Georgetown (entered in 1979, one year after the Belmont Report), and ran smack into the “pre-embryo” while writing my doctoral dissertation (Philosophical and Scientific Analysis of the Nature of the Early Human Embryo, 1991). After doing the research, it was clear to me that there was no such thing as a “pre-embryo” – yet the chairman of the Kennedy Institute of Ethics at the time was none other than Fr. Richard McCormick – really the person who pre-dated the Warnock Report’s use of the term, as he used it while sitting on the Ethics Committee of DHHS in the late 1960’s, and continued to foster it since then. He and frog biologist Clifford Grobstein then spread this fake science around the world at the speed of light, and both used the term in their own testimonies before the Warnock Committee. This was also the time of the formal “birth” of bioethics (Belmont Report,1978) – created out of thin air by mandate of the U.S. Congress -- and of course bioethicists and their colleagues across the academy picked up the term and ran with it – still are. If anyone is interested in this intertwined “pre-embryo” and “bioethics” history, here are two of my articles (with very extensive historical references): "What is 'bioethics'?" (originally published 1999, edited June 3, 2000), at: http://www.lifeissues.net/writers/irv/irv_36whatisbioethics01.html; “Abortifacients and the Role of Correct Science in Counseling, the Formation of Conscience, and Moral Decision Making” (April 12, 2009), at: http://www.lifeissues.net/writers/irv/irv_140correctscience1.html. In a later article I addressed the quagmire that the British fertility authority had when the issue of asexual human reproduction came up, and applied that rather amusing quagmire to evaluating similar laws on these related issues here in the U.S.: “Analysis of Legislative and Regulatory Chaos in the U.S.: Asexual Human Reproduction and Genetic Engineering” (Oct. 20, 2004), at: http://www.lifeissues.net/writers/irv/irv_81chaosasexgen1.html. Our own U.S. rendition of the “pre-embryo” really began when the Belmont Report was used as the legal basis of our federal regulations on the use of human subjects in research (OPRR 1981, now OHRP). In those federal regs, both “fetus” and “pregnancy” were formally defined as “beginning at implantation” – which then became part of the Common Rule (across the federal departments)! Later NIH and DHHS regs all footnote these original regs, and then each other in succession. No one has corrected any of those fake scientific definitions.
Indeed, it all became a big political game, still is, even though the term was formally rejected by the international nomenclature on human embryology decades ago. Quoting Swiss human embryologist Ronan O’Rahilly, who has sat on that international committee for decades, the term “pre-embryo “: (1) is ill-defined because it is said to end with the appearance of the primitive streak [about 15 days] or to include neurulation [formation in the early embryo of the neural plate (Stage 8, about 23 days) followed by its closure with the development of the neural tube (beginning at Stage 10 through Stage 12, about 32 days)]; (2) is inaccurate because purely embryonic cells can already be distinguished after a few days, as can also the embryonic (not pre-embryonic!) disc; (3) is unjustified because the accepted meaning of the word embryo includes all of the first 8 weeks; (4) is equivocal because it may convey the erroneous idea that a new human organism is formed at only some considerable time after fertilization; and (5) was introduced in 1986 "largely for public policy reasons." [Ronan O'Rahilly and Fabiola Muller, Human Embryology & Teratology (New York: Wiley-Lis, 2001, p. 88]
That didn’t daunt many! Instead of using the fake scientific term “pre-embryo”, they just drop that term and used the fake science alone instead – I call them “pre-embryo substitutes”, that is, the same agenda is achieved. I recently made a list of just some of those terms in another article; take a look: “This use of contrived rhetoric to refer to the newly created human embryo or fetus is now amazingly extensive; for example: a pre-zygote” vs. an embryo; a pre-embryo vs. an embryo; a being on the way vs. an already existing one; a seed vs. an organism; a phase sortal vs. a substance sortal; information content there vs. information capacity there; a biological individual vs. an ontological individual; a transient nature vs. a stable human nature; a biologically integrated whole vs. a psychologically integrated whole; a biological life only vs. a personal life; an unconscious biological life vs. a conscious personal life; a lower-brain life vs. a cortical-brain lif"; no one home vs. some one home; a zoe vs. a bios; a possible or potential human being vs. an actual human being; a possible or potential person vs. an actual human person; an object vs. a subject; an evolving member of the human species vs. an actual member of the human species; no rational attributes or sentience there vs. rational attributes or sentience there; no human cognition vs. human cognition, a ball of cells vs. an organism. Politicized terms such as spare or left-over embryos or products of conception are often used. Further rhetoric includes the false distinction between therapeutic and reproductive cloning, the deconstruction of therapeutic cloning to mean stem cell research, and the deconstruction of totipotent to mean pluripotent (Biggers 1990, pp. 1-6; Denker 2008, pp. 1656-1657; Irving 1991, pp. 1-400; Irving 1993a, pp. 18-46; Irving 1994a, pp. 42-62; Irving 2003a, pp. 1-42; Irving 2004a pp. 1-31; Irving 2005 1-36; Kischer and Irving 995, pp. 4-13, 129-184, 224-247, 248-257, 267-282). As noted above, even the centuries-old honored term "conception" itself has now been erroneously redefined as beginning at implantation rather than at fertilization, even in the law.”
Dianne N. Irving, Ph.D.
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