A reader asks:

I would like to know whether someone from this organization can help me. I need up-to-date information on medical ethics in the cloning of human organs, obtained from fetal cells at the totipotent stage. I have already gone through all of Medline and the internet and I find nothing; please, can you help me? Thanks in advance; we are a group of medical students from the National Autonomous University of Mexico.

Answer:

I remind you of what the document of the Center for Bioethics of the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart (Rome) “‘Therapeutic’ Human Cloning”[1] says. After giving its negative judgment on cloning from embryos, it states: “It is not a question [in the case dealt with] of reproducing cells identical to one another starting from a single progenitor cell, as currently happens in the field of cell cultures; nor is it simply a question of producing, by the technique of in vitro cell proliferation, tissues destined for implantation (for example, skin, bone, and cartilage tissue), according to the procedures of ‘tissue engineering’. With this technique, cells capable of proliferating and generating tissues in the laboratory are taken from the human or animal body, in order to replace damaged tissues of a patient’s body, for example, due to a severe burn. Indeed, if it were a question of the reproduction of cells or of tissue-engineering interventions, there would be, properly speaking, no ethical difficulty in admitting the liceity of these techniques…”

And further on, speaking of multipotent cells: “As regards multipotent stem cells, it is already known that they can also be found in other tissues, and not only in the early embryo. Indeed, they are found, among other places, in the yolk sac, in the liver, and in the bone marrow of the fetus, as well as in the blood of the umbilical cord at the moment of birth. When stem cells are collected from embryos or fetuses that have been spontaneously aborted, or from the umbilical cord at the moment of birth, there are no particular ethical problems…”

The same does not hold for the embryo, which is inviolable in its rights to life and physical integrity like any other person.

Author: P. Miguel Ángel Fuentes

Source: The theologian responds

Note:

[1] Cf. L’Osservatore Romano, March 5, 1999, pp. 8–9.