Scientists discuss ethics of embryonic research

At a Catholic institution such as Boston College, the discussion about when life begins is bound to be a contentious one. Dr. Maureen Condic, however, explained her answer to this question with scientific clarity in the third annual La Brecque medical ethics lecture.

The lecture was established by the La Brecque family in an effort to stimulate discourse on medical ethics in regard to the Catholic Church, with a special emphasis on maternal and fetal health.

Condic, an associate professor in the department of neurobiology and anatomy at the University of Utah who specializes in developmental neurobiology and has received over $3 million in grants for her research in embryological biology, spoke Thursday on the ethical dilemmas that arise from her work.

The lecture, titled "Faith, Reason, and the Nature of Human Embryos," explored the concept of development and sought to define the beginning of human life; a topic, Condic said, that is "shrouded in darkness, mystery, and controversy."

The prenatal origins of life, she said, have fascinated mankind for centuries. In the modern age, this means a fascination with the bearing of children, with the nature of an embryo, and the pursuit of scientific knowledge to alleviate human suffering.

The challenge, then, is that the embryo falls far outside the ordinary human experience. "Typically, we formulate opinions based on what we observe," Condic said. "In contrast to our ample experience with postnatal stages of life, we don't have personal experience with embryos. We don't interact with them in our daily lives." This, she said, establishes a poor foundation for the intuitive understanding that forms our daily thinking. Because we lack a natural understanding of embryos, she said, "We must formulate our opinion in another way."

"Scientists are just as likely as anyone else to appeal to their central values," she said. "They don't arise from religious tradition, but to an inflation of the scientific process."

This is the doctrine of scientism, whose canon supposed that an embryo is not an organism, but a group of cells. Condic termed this reductionism, a school of thought that posits that embryos are nothing more than the cells that comprise them, she said. "What evidence proves that an embryo is just a group of cells?" Condic asked, noting that the existence of the immaterial cannot be disproved.

Patrick Byrne, a professor in the philosophy department, clarified this point of view. "Scientism regards embryos not as organism but a collection of cells," he said. "But Condic's argument is that that's not science - she compared it to a religious belief system. Her argument shows that there is an organized organism."

The presentation that followed, Condic said, was one of cold science; she proceeded to explain the process of fertilization and the early stages of development with a technical slide presentation.

"When you look at the early stages of embryonic development, the one thing that strikes most people is that embryos don't look like human beings. How do we know whether an embryo is a human being, or merely a ball of human cells?" she said. "I answer the question of what something is by watching what it does."

The embryo, she said, undergoes a self-directed, organized pattern of development to generate the fetus. It functions not as a single cell or a group of cells, but as an organism.

An organism, she said, can be defined by four basic characteristics: "An organism shows growth toward a characteristic mature form, repair of injury, adaptation to changing environmental circumstances so that the overall function of the organism is preserved, and coordinated function of all parts for the good of the whole," Condic said. All of these are characteristics of a human embryo, she said.

"The entire business of an embryo is to mature toward a characteristic form," Condic said. She cited an embryo's ability to recover from the removal of one of its eight cells as an example of the ability to repair injury. As an instance of adaptation, Condic referenced the case of Nhlahla Ncise of South Africa, who developed completely normally not in her mother's uterus, but in her liver.

"The fact that an embryo can develop in such a radically abnormal location of the body is a strong testament to adaptive ability of embryos," she said. "From the very beginning, the embryo acts as an organism. It exhibits all the important features of an organism … these conclusions are objective and not dependent on any religious perspective."

The only conclusion to be drawn from these facts, she said, is that the embryo is a human organism from the earliest stages of life, a fact which supports and expands the suppositions of Christian doctrine.

Though all scientists will agree that fertilization results in the formation of a new individual, the timetable on this formation is unclear to some. The exact moment of fertilization is imprecise.

"What is not agreed upon is whether fertilization is an event or a process. This controversy exists because there are a number of 'unique' events that occur during the first day of life, concluding with the fusion of the pronuclei and the first cell division," Condic said. "If you are reading a medical textbook, you will find that fertilization is a process."

Condic, however, said that fertilization is not a process, but an event. When the sperm and egg fuse, she said, they cease to be. The sperm ruptures, ejecting its nucleus and cellular contents. Though what happens to the egg is harder to conceptualize, she said, the resulting cell has a distinct composition, and thus ceases to exist as a separate cell.

Condic said that the zygote is an organism, and said that like the embryo, it initiates a unique series of developmental events that involve the coordination of parts derived from both gametes, the first steps in an ongoing program.