Field Notes

The January-February issue of the Report was supposed to include one more article. What appeared was a set of short essays on the state of stem cell science and a feature article on how to choose cell lines for stem cell therapies in a way that is fair to African-Americans and other minority populations. We had also planned an article on the implications of recent work on primate cloning, including the seemingly groundbreaking work on human cloning led by Woo Suk Hwang at Seoul National University in South Korea. The authors of that article, Insoo Hyun and Kyu Won Jung, had collaborated with Hwang during his launch of the World Stem Cell Hub, the library of stem cell lines that Hwang planned to make available to researchers around the world.

Alas, none of it was to be. As the issue was going to press, the story broke that Hwang's work was fraudulent from front to back. He had never produced human embryonic stem cells through cloning. The Hub had nothing to provide. Hyun and Jung decided, in consultation with us, to withdraw their article. One of our essayists, the science writer Steve Hall, had written of the political delays that were slowing the science and frustrating the scientists; now scientists were causing their own delays, and some observers must have wondered whether the research was dead in the water.

Ah, but we pick up the pieces. In the current issue, Hyun offers an essay about the fraud, the damage it has done, and the lessons to be learned from it. In his estimation, the problem was about scientific fraud generally, not about the techniques of stem cell science, and therefore stem cell science did not suffer the same kind of setback that research on gene therapy suffered when some subjects developed leukemia after undergoing gene therapy protocols. Hyun writes that other researchers are pressing ahead, going back to work they had abandoned when Hwang announced his apparent advances, and that the science will probably make up the lost ground.

The feature articles in this issue turn on how personhood is affected by damage to the body. The angle taken by philosopher Barry Hoffmaster is to consider how human vulnerability (by which he means lack of power or control) is important to morality; Hoffmaster argues that only by considering our shared vulnerability do we recognize our bonds to other human beings and affirm our shared humanity. In the lead article, Bruce Jennings (about whom see Field Notes, on the inside front cover) discusses a very special and severe case of vulnerability, that of a person who has received a traumatic brain injury; he writes that the task of caring for people with TBI is precisely to make use of the bonds they have with other people in order to affirm their humanity—to return them to being human beings.

Although both articles insist that people who have reduced cognitive skills are not therefore less than persons, they have (it seems to me) interestingly different emphases. Hoffmaster writes of acknowledging vulnerability, and of recognizing personhood through vulnerability; Jennings of confronting vulnerability, of not allowing the person with TBI to be defined merely by vulnerability. Hoffmaster is critical of moral theorists who, accidentally endorsing a kind of mind-body dualism, pay attention only to rationality and ignore the body; Jennings is critical of caregivers who, rejecting mind-body dualism too carelessly, infer that irreparable damage to the brain is necessarily catastrophic loss of mind. Thus do the undying questions of philosophy inform new issues in bioethics.