[I thought that this would be of interest to MOJ readers. I've reprinted the whole piece--from today's online Chronicle of Higher Education--because one has to be a subscriber to access the item.]
National Academies Report Recommends New Oversight Boards and Tighter Rules for Stem-Cell Research
By JEFFREY BRAINARD
Universities and research institutions should set up a new kind of
in-house oversight committee to approve and manage studies using human
embryonic stem cells, a National Academies panel recommended on
Tuesday. In a report, the panel also suggested guidelines for the
ethical conduct of the research that are stricter than existing
government rules.
The report,
"Guidelines for Human Embryonic Stem Cell Research," says the new
oversight committees would provide an additional level of review beyond
the monitoring done by other university committees, like institutional
review boards. The panel said that the new committees would ensure that
the controversial studies were conducted in a uniform and transparent
way, and thus would help build public confidence in them.
For example, the panel assumed that university researchers
would continue to create new colonies, or lines, of human embryonic
stem cells. The practice remains controversial because scientists must
destroy early-stage embryos to obtain the cells, and some people
consider the embryos to be human lives. The panel said that out of
respect for those ethical concerns, the new oversight committees should
not allow researchers to destroy embryos that are older than 14 days.
The proposed guidelines would require that researchers obtain informed
consent from all donors of eggs and sperm used to make embryos used in
studies -- including from anonymous sperm donors, which is not now
required.
"While we were hesitant to recommend another bureaucratic
oversight entity, the burden in this case is justified, given the novel
and controversial nature of embryonic-stem-cell research," Jonathan D.
Moreno, a professor of biomedical ethics at the University of Virginia
and co-chairman of the academies' panel, said in a written statement.
The panel prescribed the changes in response to a "perception"
that the research "is unregulated," the report says. Scientists now
face a patchwork of federal and state regulations covering stem-cell
studies, and many of the rules "were not designed with this research
specifically in mind, and there are gaps in how well they cover" the
research.
What's more, President Bush decided in 2001 that scientists
could receive federal research funds for such studies only if they used
stem-cell lines that existed at the time. As a result, a growing number
of universities are moving toward using private or state funds to study
newer lines of stem cells that, researchers say, appear to be more
scientifically promising. Some observers have worried that the trend
will reinforce the variation across states.
Supporters of stem-cell research hope that the panel's report
will play a role in helping to relax Mr. Bush's limits, although the
panel itself did not recommend such a step. Even with private and state
money flowing into the field, advocates say, the research will move
forward more rapidly with federal funds.
"Leading institutions engaged in stem-cell research have many
of the protections recommended ... already in place," said Daniel P.
Perry, president of the Coalition for the Advancement of Medical
Research, a consortium of universities and other groups that supports
the studies. "They need only a more supportive and positive federal
environment to make the research flourish. The strong ethical standards
in this timely report should give Congressional champions of research
even more support to expand the current federal stem-cell policy, and
should give those who are still waiting on the sidelines a reason to
get in the game."
While the report urges universities to adopt the guidelines
voluntarily, it also suggests that agencies providing research funds
and academic publishers push universities to observe them as a
condition of receiving the funds and getting papers published.
The new review boards would consider a variety of issues. They
would oversee steps to protect the privacy of parents who donated
embryos, sperm, or eggs used in the research. Most stem-cell lines have
been created from excess embryos left over from fertility clinics.
In addition, the proposed guidelines would prohibit researchers
from paying donors of sperm and eggs used to create embryos. Women who
donate eggs for reproductive purposes usually are paid, to reflect the
heightened risks associated with the medical procedure to harvest the
eggs. But some people view payments as an inappropriate inducement, the
panel said.
"The sensitivities surrounding this research are significant,
and we thought it was better to err on the side of caution," Richard O.
Hynes, a professor of biology and co-chairman of the academies' panel,
said at a news conference on Tuesday.
The stem-cell committees would also review all work to create
new lines of stem cells and would require scientists to explain why
doing so would advance the research.
The committees would also approve any proposal to transplant
human embryonic stem cells into animals. Scientists use the technique
to study how the human cells grow and function in living systems, and
they hope to learn how to use the cells to develop new medical
treatments for diseased and ailing organs in human beings. Stem cells
are undifferentiated building blocks capable of developing into any
specialized cell in the adult body.
In addition, the panel recommended that the university
oversight committees bar research to implant human stem cells into
early-stage embryos of monkeys. The report said this would avoid the
unwanted, but unlikely, result that the human cells would endow the
animals with human-like mental capacities. The boards should carefully
monitor transplants of the cells into animals of other species, the
panel said.
_________________________
Michael P.
Tuesday, April 26, 2005
[Received this message from Gerry Whyte of Trinity College, Dublin:]
Further to your recent posting on MOJ, you might be interested in the
following extract from a letter by a colleague, Professor Finbarr
McAuley, in University College Dublin published in today's Irish Times:
[The] claim that the "last century was the first time the church...condemned
the death penalty" is wrong by a margin of 800 years. The death penalty was
roundly condemned by canon 18 of the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215.
Moreover, the inspiration for the Church's long-standing antipathy to all
forms of blood punishment, including the death penalty, did not come from the
human sciences ... but from [the] discipline of theology. The decisive argument
had to do with the risk to the immortal soul believed to be associated with the
shedding of human blood. Although this was a theological argument developed by
the Latin fathers of late antiquity, it was taken up by the canon lawyers of the
12th and 13th centuries, who made it the cornerstone of the new concept of
voluntary homicide.
Because the medieval canonists defined the mortal sin of homicide as
including all forms of negligent and unjustified killing (as well as otherwise
lawful killings done with an improper motive), Pope Innocent III, who convened
the Fourth Lateran Council, decided that the only safe course was to ban
priestly involvement in any procedure, whether judicial or surgical, which
entailed the risk of wrongful killing thus defined, thereby effectively bringing
to an end the centuries-old practice of trial by fire and water and inaugurating
the Church's long and honourable association with an enlightened penology of
rehabilitation.
... [It] is depressing, if sadly predictable, to learn that theological
studies in the modern age do not appear to include an appreciation of the
enduring contribution to legal civilisation made by the Catholic theologians and
canon lawyers of the medieval period.
Is it any wonder that the new pontiff, himself a distinguished theologian,
seems to view the blinding certainties of its practitioners with modified
rapture? - Yours etc.,
Prof FINBARR McAULEY, Faculty of Law, UCD, Dublin 4.
Surely there are few in any issues a blog devoted to the development of Catholic legal theory should be more concerned with than the morality of capital punishment. The article excerpted below, The Right to Life, will appear in the May 12th edition of The New York Review of Books. To print/read the entire piece, click here. Some excerpts follow:
In her book Dead Man Walking, published in 1993, Sister Helen
explained how she first became involved with condemned prisoners, and
she traces the cases of three men whom she accompanied, as their
spiritual adviser, through their final days and hours. It was a
best-selling and highly influential book, its arguments given wider
currency by the film starring Susan Sarandon in the role of Sister
Helen. This new book appears at a time when the death penalty system is
in crisis. In 2000 James Liebman of Columbia University School of Law
led a team which surveyed four and a half thousand death penalty cases
and found "reversible error" in 68 percent of them. In his words—which
seem the more true, five years on—the system is "collapsing under the
weight of its own mistakes."
...
After his death, Sister Helen took O'Dell's body to
Italy for burial, and was granted an audience with John Paul II. This
was the climax of her campaign within the Catholic Church, and she
credits the O'Dell case with helping to change teaching which had stood
since the days of Saint Thomas Aquinas. When she began campaigning,
many individual priests and Catholic laypeople were abolitionists, but
the hierarchy was not, and in Dead Man Walking she tells of her
encounters with an obstructive prison chaplain who incarnated the
conservative, misogynist status quo. After her letters, and her visit
to the Vatican in the wake of the O'Dell case, Pope John Paul spoke out
unequivocally against the death penalty, and the Catholic Catechism was
altered. Unfortunately, it was altered by the removal of words that
specifically endorsed capital punishment, rather than by the addition
of words to exclude it. There is plenty here for theologians and
Catholic lawyers to argue over, so the change may not be quite the
lasting triumph that Sister Helen thought it.
Among the promoters of the death penalty, Sister Helen picks out
Justice Antonin Scalia of the US Supreme Court for special odium. He is
a prominent Catholic; how can he vote against the Church's teaching?
"My morality and religious beliefs have nothing to do with how I vote,"
he says, and he aims to keep "personal predilections, biases, and moral
and religious beliefs" out of the process of constitutional
interpretation. Where does he leave them, the reader wonders, when he
goes to work? Is there a sort of depository or a left-luggage office
where you check in your personal experience and judgment, while you
shrink yourself to a cog or spring in the great machinery of the law?
...
Even if you cannot stand behind every argument the author makes, The Death of Innocents
is a deeply convinced and deeply convincing book. Now we know what's
wrong: racial bias, bias against the poor, inept counsel, overzealous
prosecutors trying to make a name, self-serving judges, missing
witnesses, careless science, coerced confessions. Add in the use of
jailhouse informants, the propensity of police officers to lie, and
their evident inability to reason about the facts of a case, and you
have a recipe for the continuing conviction and death of innocent
people.
...
As Sister Helen sees it, attempts to make the penalty more
consistent have failed. Yet where defects are only procedural, they
could be remedied; given political will and a bottomless public purse,
possibly they could be fixed. If the bureaucrats were wise and the
system fair—if the process met tightly defined legal criteria of
objectivity—would it be all right to have a death penalty? Many would
say yes. Sister Helen is clear in her view. "I don't believe that the
government should be put in charge of killing anybody, even those
proven guilty of terrible crimes." This is what the world would like to
hear America say. You do not have to be a Christian, or have any faith
at all, to support Sister Helen's basic position: "Every human being is
worth more than the worst act of his or her life."
The death penalty is not wrong because it is inconsistently
administered. If it were fairly administered, it would still be wrong.
Finally, the issue is moral; a nation so God-besotted should be able to
grasp that. When the government touches a corpse, it contaminates the
private citizen. A modern nation that deals in state-sponsored death,
becomes, in part, dead in itself; dead certainly, to the enlightened
ideals from which America derives its existence as a nation.
__________
Michael P.
Monday, April 25, 2005
Sightings 4/25/05
Considering Pope
Benedict XVI
-- Martin E. Marty
Back from relative hiding on mounts and in wastelands
during a papal funeral and a papal election, I have returned to the real
world. Asked frequently for my take on Pope Benedict XVI, I have this to
offer:
-- Benedict XVI is a good choice of name. We
wish him benediction.
-- I've tracked him since 1964 (at Vatican II)
through his significant turn rightward around 1968, and find him consistent ever
since. No surprises.
-- He is conservative. So? All the
cardinals appointed by John Paul II are so. The issue is not "how
conservative will he be?" but "how will he be conservative?" -- meaning how
expansive, open, and interactive he may be with other Catholics, other
Christians, other religions, and secular citizens.
-- As they did with John Paul II, Protestants will
largely hold their fire, knowing that the profound and agonized criticisms will
come from the pope's fellow Catholics.
-- Thus far, there have been more
grumblings from the "Catholic right" about attacks from the "Catholic left" than
there have been attacks. Not all Catholics bow low enough to please the
right. But many lapse into respectful sullenness in a "give the pope a
chance" posture. They will criticize when he gets going, when actions
displease.
-- My own citizen-based grumbles: His intervention in the
American political campaigns last year broke tradition, portended more
involvement, and would have been greeted as a confirmation of non-Catholic
Americans' worst fears -- except that many citizens, welcoming his positions,
departed from their own long-standing "no papal intervention" traditions.
As for world politics: Will his firm stand against contraception lead him to
persist in condemning condoms, with no exceptions -- even, for example, in
Africa, where that position contributes to many thousands of deaths?
--
Ecumenically this pope is a hard-liner against Anglican orders. He often
regards believers who are not in the "papal obedience" orbit to be good
individual Christians, though not really in churches as part of the one body of
Christ. But two cheers from this Lutheran: he supported and no doubt
rescued the 1999 "Joint Declaration" on justification between the Lutheran World
Federation (which he wishes were a church) and the Vatican, and has made
friendly-to-Luther noises since as early as 1966.
-- He's maybe a bit too
ready to slap the adjective "infallible" in front of many current church
teachings, for example, against the ordination of women. So far,
infallibility has been invoked formally only two times, with a century between
them: once in defining the Immaculate Conception and again in defining the
Assumption of the Blessed Virgin. It would be nice to wait another hundred
years before it's invoked again -- if it has to be used at all.
-- His boyhood in Germany during the Nazi regime?
Utterly a non-issue.
-- A very smart man, educated and intellectual, he
shares his predecessor's zeal for defining doctrine, but brings more passion to
enforcing definitions. Will the responsibilities of office and his need to
reach out change him and his profile?
-- Was the selection of a Western European who met
indifference and hostility on many Western fronts of Catholicism a sign that the
cardinals have given up on Europe, or the expression of a desperate hope that he
can turn things around? Wait and see.
-- There were too many claims that the politicking
surrounding the election of the pope was the work of the Holy Spirit. Yes,
Christians can believe it was in the end the Spirit's work -- but this came to
be overstated. Hover now, as-if-winged Spirit.
----------
Saturday, April 23, 2005
The final part of the Steinfels article I featured in my post earlier today bears quoting here:
Some people have already written off Benedict XVI, while others are
rushing almost to canonize him. Pending a clearer sense of his own
vision of the world and of the priorities such a vision suggests, both
reactions seem premature.
In a televised interview eight years ago, cited in John Allen's book
"Conclave" (Doubleday, 2002), one high-ranking Catholic official gave a
rather minimal view of what Catholics should automatically assume about
a newly chosen pope. Asked whether "the Holy Spirit plays a role in the
election of the pope," the official replied, "I would not say so in the
sense that the Holy Spirit picks out the pope, because there are too
many contrary instances of popes the Holy Spirit would obviously not
have picked."
"The Spirit's role should be understood in a much more elastic
sense," the official added. "Probably the only assurance he offers is
that the thing cannot be totally ruined."
That official was Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI.
Michael P.
In today's New York Times, Peter Steinfel's "Beliefs" column is very interesting and provocative.
What Does the Selection of the New Pope Portend for American Catholic Youths?
By PETER STEINFELS
n
the days after Pope John Paul II died, only his role in helping bring
on the collapse of Communism earned more comment than his gift for
reaching young people with the challenge of the Gospel.
That testimony, along with the images of youthful backpackers
swelling the crowds of mourners in St. Peter's Square, stirred memories
of things witnessed firsthand in Denver 12 years ago at World Youth
Day, and elsewhere.
But those recollections only made it all the more jarring to be
simultaneously poring over a National Study of Youth and Religion,
undertaken at the University of North Carolina, and its findings about
American Catholic teenagers - findings that raise obvious questions
about the way leadership will be exercised in the papacy of Benedict
XVI.
Those findings have recently been published in "Soul Searching: The
Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers" (Oxford University
Press, 2005), by Christian Smith and Melinda Lundquist Denton. With a
mixture of good news and bad news that punctures many stereotypes about
adolescent religious beliefs and behavior, this extensive study
deserves attention for what it reveals across the full range of
American religious groups.
But what leapt out during this papal transition was that the
researchers had felt compelled to devote a separate chapter to their
discovery that Catholic teenagers "stand out among the U.S. Christian
teenagers as consistently scoring lower on most measures of
religiosity."
On various questions about beliefs, practices, experiences and
commitments, the researchers found Catholic youths "scoring 5 to 25
percentage points lower than their conservative, mainline and black
Protestant peers." In-depth interviews showed many of these Catholic
adolescents "living far outside of official church norms."
Catholic teenagers were far less apt to affirm belief in a personal
God, to report having ever undergone a very moving, powerful worship
experience, or to say their faith was extremely important in shaping
their daily lives or major life decisions.
There has been a lot of impressionistic talk, often verging on
boosterism, about a new "John Paul II generation" of deeply committed,
conservative young Catholics. So what should be said about this quite
different-looking crop of John Paul II teenagers? How did this happen
on the watch of the very pope who undeniably exhibited such magnetism
among youth?
[Keep reading ... click here.]
Michael P.
