The Name of the Embryo

What is above all needed is to let the meaning choose the word, and not the other way around.

—George Orwell, "Politics and the English Language"

The embryonic stem cell debate has stimulated discussion of ethical and policy issues that as recently as a few years ago were either fairly far down the list of moral controversies, such as payment for oocytes and the creation of human-nonhuman chimeras, or were only fictional. The use of human blastocysts created by somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT) falls into the latter category. Like the stem cell debate more generally, the idea of using the products of SCNT to generate lines of human embryonic stem cells has thrust a remarkably esoteric matter into the political scene. During the 2004 campaign for the California stem cell research initiative, which ultimately passed, opponents accused the initiative's sponsors of deception in using the term "SCNT" rather than "cloning." They argued that the use of a neutral expression deliberately obfuscated what was "really going on" in the initiative. For a time it looked as though the whole political campaign might degenerate into a seminar on the philosophy of language.

Now come Insoo Hyun and Kyu Won Jung, authoring a feature article on cloning in this issue of the Hastings Center Report, to throw another problem of meaning and reference into the stem cell soup. Commentators and policy-makers have generally believed that the hundreds of thousands of embryos remaining in fertility clinics are the least ethically problematic source of human embryonic stem cells. They could be freely donated, and they will never be implanted so will never be in a position to continue to develop, the standard argument goes. However, critics often assert that there is in this argument a suppressed appeal to a notorious premise that these leftover embryos "will die anyway," thus associating the feared massacre of human embryos in fertility clinics with a previous holocaust.

The proposal by Hyun and Jung—that the products of SCNT, even though they may appear to be embryos, really are not, and therefore are a wholly unobjectionable source of cells—should therefore appease the opponents. But is their argument about the moral status of the product of SCNT sound? Well, as the professor said, it depends. They assert, first, that the technique that makes it possible to create SCNT blastocysts may make it impossible for those blasto-cysts to develop further. Let us suppose this is true—a dangerous assumption that amounts to betting against the resourcefulness of modern biologists and the Nobel prizes that beckon them. They then argue that, since what it is to be an embryo includes a certain "teleological trajectory," which includes being organized to develop further—and since the products of SCNT appear to lack this telos, they are not really human embryos. In fact, they really should not even be called "cloned human embryos," insofar as that suggests that they have the same telic properties as the original cell.

Perhaps wisely, Hyun and Jung do not suggest what term should be used to refer to "entities that are merely continuations of the somatic cell donor's genetic material," but it better be one that harbors no misleading meaning, a la Orwell. In the spirit of Marcel Duchamp I suggest we call them Fred.

At this point we may decide it's best to decamp for Metaphysics 101, yet I doubt that the opponents of embryonic stem cell research will be convinced that they should embrace the maneuvers that produce SCNT blastocysts. Consider the reception of the single-cell biopsy process that was recently reported to have been used to grow two lines of pluripotent stem cells, a technique that seems able to preserve the embryo. Although one might have expected this approach to satisfy those who object to removing the inner-cell mass from six-day old blastocysts because doing so destroys the embryo, many opponents continue to object to the idea of manipulating an embryo as a mere means for the benefit of another human being who happens to be already born and ill. To the proponents this might seem like...