06.30.07
Problem of soul, solved!
Master of creation?
A Nobel prize-winning scientist says he has discovered how human souls are made. It is an epic story of struggle and triumph in the womb - and it could end the worldwide rift over human-embryo experiments John Cornwell
I am amazed, solved the problem of the soul!
Not so long ago I quarrelled with a friend as he lay dying in hospital with leukaemia. He had read an article about new medical research, how the harvesting of cells from early human embryos, which are thereby destroyed, could result in a cure for his disease.
“I wouldn’t want to benefit from a cure,” he said, “that involves sacrificing another human life.”
I hesitated to agree and he grew furious with me.
Scientists, religious believers, ethicists, politicians, governments, are gripped by the worldwide quarrel over human stem-cell research that involves the destruction of the human embryo. Stem cells are those so-called ‘mother cells? that can, in theory, be turned into any tissue type, promising cures for serious illnesses like Alzheimer’s, cancer and heart disease.
This is a story about new science and new ways of understanding how and when we become human individuals in the womb. Can new thinking about human developmental biology shatter old prejudices to bring religion and science closer together and resolve the most intransigent ethical divide in recent history?
The nub of the current conflict is a battle between “cells” and ’souls”, with no prospect for a common language. ‘The newly fertilized human egg, a tiny cell one two-hundredth of an inch in diameter, is not a human being. It’s a set of instructions set adrift into the cavity of the womb,” declares the biologist E O Wilson, hailed as “Darwin’s natural heir”, and a guru on what biology tells us about human nature. His opinion belongs in a different universe from that of many religious believers: for example, the billion-strong Catholic Church, which maintains that the newly fertilised human egg is a “human individual, body and soul” possessing the “dignity of the person, who is not just something, but someone”.