The President, a doctor from China & stem cells
Two men look at harvesting humans just for“spare parts”
From, The Kentucky Citizen Digest, September/October, 2001.

“We recoil at the idea of growing human beings for spare body parts,” said President Bush, in his national address regarding his decision to fund limited embryonic stem cell research.  He also said that he hoped to “foster respect for life in America and throughout the world.”  His words are both comforting and cryptic in light of the stem cell debate’s similarities with another situation:
   
A Chinese doctor whose work helped heal countless burn victims and even restored sight to the blind in China is seeking asylum in the United States because he said his conscience had been “tortured.”  Dr. Wang Guoqi extracted for transplantation, skin, corneas, and kidneys, from executed prisoners without their consent.
   
According to the Washington Post, Wang is especially troubled by the memory of a man whose executioner botched the job and handed him over to him and other surgeons who skinned, gutted, and threw him half dead into a plastic bag, and then loaded him unceremoniously onto a flatbed truck.  That was the last Wang saw of him—except perhaps in his nightmares.
   
Even if some nice people got those organs and went on to live productive lives, even if the organs’ $15,000 price tag funded great strides in medical research, even if the man was going to die anyway, there’s still the gruesome ring of rottenness about using people as though they were inventory in a junkyard salvage store.
   
“The fact that a living being is going to die does not justify experimenting on it,” the president said. In this, he seemed to be trying to avoid the slippery slope of devaluing human life that lands us in a situation like that of China’s unfortunate inmates.  In allowing funding for only those stem cell lines already established—meaning no funds for further destruction of embryos, he quelled a portion of the debate temporarily, but for how long?
   
Many are already questioning the practicality of using only those 60 established lines, and soon the debate over destroying more embryos will return, like a toothache in a rush of cold air. Somewhere along the line it will have to be determined whether the “donors” (frozen embryos, like China’s prisoners) are more valuable to society dead than alive, and the whether the human soul has an inherent dignity beyond its usefulness—even for the noblest of purposes.
   
Of course we care about people suffering with Parkinson’s or Alzheimer’s disease, but embryonic stem cells are only one of several avenues for research.  A case in point is Congressman Ron Lewis’ promotion of research involving, of all things, tobacco plants, as promising vehicles in non-embryonic stem cell research.  The great thing about this initiative and many others involving stem cells from sources other than embryos is that nobody dies, and no one has to make moral judgments about who is most worthy to live.
   
The president’s assertion that science offers us both “great promise and great peril” illustrates the gravity of this debate, not just for us but for the generations that follow.  Our children will bear the consequences for the honor or guilt of our decisions.  And let us not forget that honor and guilt are real and immediate.  Consider Dr. Wang, a product of Communist atheistic China, a man one would expect to be free of enigmatic questions of soul.  Still he lamented, “Whatever impact I have made in the lives of burn victims and transplant patients does not excuse the unethical and immoral manner of extracting organs.”
   
Do you wonder what he’d say about embryonic stem cell research?  

Key Family Foundation Contacts: Kent Ostrander , Executive Director Martin Cothran , Senior Associate Policy Analyst