Does It Have to be hESC? A Note on War, Embryo, and the Disabled

In the spring semester of 2006, in my previous university position, I offered a course entitled: "Does it have to be hESC? Ethics and debate of stem cell research and cloning." As part of the course assignment, my students, divided into small groups, had to conduct group research on either a nation (or state within it) or a religious/political movement and its position on human embryonic stem cell research to present to the class. Groups elected to present on Israel, California, Canada, Vatican, the Bush-Kerry 2004 Presidential campaign, and South Korea. Outstanding presentations brought to the foreground how difficult it would be to reach any kind of complete agreement on ethical standards of human embryonic stem cell (hESC) research on an international level, yet at the same time, nearly all emphasized how important such an agreement would be, on the basis that hESC research concerns precisely what we see as life or non-life. Here, life's national specificity and human universality clashed head on.

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Debates on hESC research are multi-directional, including the precise point of life's beginning, the moral status of embryo, and how to reconcile with the existing practice of discarding and destroying not insignificant portions of spare embryos that are produced from IVF (in vitro fertilization), diverse religious views on what embryo is, and so on. Paralleling these discussions, (industrialized) national-states' efforts to participate in global competition, mixed with individual scientists' dreams and ambitions, creates an enormously complex terrain in which to observe debates about what life is and how it should be treated.

These debates on life, involving individual, cultural, political, national, and international actors, curiously, are also about death—notably, the question of of whether non-life=death. It is here that the most salient, yet characteristically unspoken, points are contained. For, as I shall argue below, societies (including our own) are constantly making decisions about who can survive and who can be killed.

If any society in a certain period of history under certain conditions does not necessarily see an individual life belonging exclusively to an individual, then this individual's death may not result in death. More concretely: in the current rhetoric of the US government with regard to the American soldier's death in Iraq, references to the eternity of life prevail—the deceased soldier being not dead, but alive, eternally with us. If so, in the US, under the current national emergency, individual lives are not the exclusive property of individuals—they belong, at least in part, to the nation. As long as the nation survives, the dead soldier never dies.

As another example, many nations, including the US, allow brain death to be deemed as death proper and, as we witnessed in the 2005 removal of Terry Schiavo's feeding tube, the political and judiciary institution such as courts and the congress interfered directly and exercised their authority to endorse or disputing the death ("Schiavo's feeding tube removed" 2005, see also Lock 2002 for a comparative study). Often, on the other hand, the brain-dead person's fully functioning organs or even, as in the recent transplantion in France, a face ("Woman has first face transplant" 2006). Body parts are donated to needy persons and, in this practice, the donated organ, part of the life of the deceased, continues to live, fused with someone else's life.

These instances evoke the concept of sacrifice. Individual sacrifices for a larger and supposedly more meaningful collectivity are often not seen as death. Humans have done this since primordial times, both in myths and rituals: Adonis's sacrifice for the vegetation god, offers of virgin sexuality for the temple of Ishtar, and other such instances are abundantly recorded (Frazer 1922, Herodotus 1954). From Hollywood movie themes to pious martyrdoms, sacrificial tales continue to surround us today. If a soldier's death...