by Susan Brinkmann, OCDS
Staff Writer

(Feb. 5, 2008) In the same week that Pope Benedict XVI warned against allowing reproductive technology to trump human dignity, British scientists announced the formation of an embryo with three parents and claim to have found a way to enable lesbian couples to have their own
biological children.

In an effort to insure that women with diseases of the mitochondria – mini-organs that are found within individual cells – do not pass these defects onto their children, scientists at England’s Newcastle University created embryos containing the DNA from a mother and father, then implanted the nucleus into a donor egg whose DNA had been mostly removed.

The result was an embryo that contained only the genetic information necessary to properly control the production of mitochondria. In other words, mom and dad’s genes were intact, and the only genes present from another woman were those necessary to correct mom’s defect.

Unfortunately, this scientific breakthrough was had through experimentation on 10 embryos which were left over from in vitro fertilization (IVF) attempts. All were destroyed in the process, as were the six new embryos, which were allowed to develop normally for six days. They had to be destroyed because the Newcastle team only had permission to conduct experiments in the
laboratory and did not have permission to offer the treatment to the public.

Scientists at the same university also announced that they were were able to coax male bone marrow cells into developing into a kind of primitive sperm cell, and are applying for permission to duplicate the process with female embryonic stem cells, thus allowing two women to produce biological offspring.

Professor Karim Nayernia, Professor of Stem Cell Biology at Newcastle University, successfully developed sperm from stem cells taken from adult men last spring. He has already used sperm derived from embryonic stem cells to fertilize a mouse which produced seven pups. Six of the pups lived to adulthood, although all of them had health problems.
Research into methods allowing reproduction in same-sex couples is not new.

According to London’s Telegraph, a Brazilian researcher in Sao Paulo claims to have made both sperm and eggs from cultures of male mouse embryonic stem cells. If these experiments work, they will set the stage to allow gay men to donate skin cells that could be used to make eggs which could then be fertilized by their partner.

While careful to stress that the Church appreciates and encourages progress in the biomedical sciences, Pope Benedict XVI recently asked the Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith to focus on methods that clearly violate human dignity.

“The Church’s Magisterium certainly cannot and should not intervene on every scientific innovation,” he said. “Rather, it has the task of reiterating the great values at stake, and providing the faithful, and all men and women of good will, with ethical moral principals and guidelines for these new and important questions.”

Guidelines are definitely needed because so many of these scientific advances come at the expense of human embryos who are increasingly being relegated to the status of objects for experimentation rather than respected as humans beings who were created in the image of God.

The Holy Father offered two fundamental criteria for moral discernment in this area: “unconditional respect for the human being as a person, from conception to natural death; and respect for the origin of the transmission of human life through the acts of the spouses.”

Among the areas he cited that need “re-evaluation” are the freezing of human embryos, embryonal reduction, pre-implantation diagnosis, stem cell research and attempts at human cloning.

These reproductive technologies “clearly show how, with artificial insemination outsidet he body, the barrier protecting human dignity has been broken. When human beings in the weakest and most defenseless stage of their existence are selected, abandoned, kiolled or used as pure ‘biological matter’ how can it be denied that they are no longer being treated as ‘someone’ but as ‘something’, thus placing the very concept of human dignity in doubt.”

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