Photograph by Daniel Andor

For Sabrina Desbordes, who has worked with stem cells for years at MSKCC, the opening of the Mortimer B. Zuckerman Research Center has caused great inconvenience. She has been relying on high-throughput and cell-sorting equipment in the core facilities at MSKCC. Now that most of these facilities have been moved into the new Zuckerman building, she would have to bring all her cells across the street if she needed to use the same machines. However, she can’t do that. It’s not that the stem cells cannot stand the traffic on 68th Street. Rather, no human embryonic stem cells can be worked with or even be present in the new building. She is left with a few machines that can barely meet her needs. Fortunately, “I’m almost done with my project,” she told Natural Selections. Unfortunately, however, “for people who will carry on with the follow-ups, this situation is going to be extremely inconvenient,” said Sabrina.

Photograph by Daniel Andor

Apparently it was agreed and signed by both sides that no human embryonic stem cell would be ever used in the Zuckerman Research Center, because “the property would not be used for things that are contrary to the teachings of the Catholic Church,” said Joseph Zwilling, director of communications for the Archdiocese of New York.

One foundational principle of Catholicism is the sanctity of human life and the inherent dignity of the human person². In Western thought, the sanctity of life is applied only to humans, contrasting with many schools of Eastern philosophy in which all lives are equal. Pope John Paul II wrote and spoke extensively on the topic of the inviolability of human life in his encyclical, Evangelium Vitae, The Gospel of Life. A human embryonic stem cell line is established from a blastocyst that is approximately four to five days old. The Catholic teaching holds that life begins at conception, a view that is shared by some others in the Christian world. Under this moral viewpoint, any action that destroys an embryo or a fetus kills a human being. Research on human embryonic stem cells, therefore, falls in their forbidden range. The Christian view on when life begins, however, is not shared in other religions. In the Islamic world, a general consensus is that the fetus is not a life until 40 days old, as described in a hadith, Sahih Bukhari, a collection of sayings and deeds of the Prophet Muhammad³. Egypt and Iran, for example, have conducted stem cell research.

One thing is sure: researchers working on human embryonic stem cells at MSKCC will not be able to enjoy this new building and its facilities. When asked for comment, the public affairs office at MSKCC would only say, “stem cell research has been underway for several years at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in our Rockefeller Research Laboratories Building. There are no plans to move these laboratories and to conduct stem cell research in the Zuckerman Research Building.” Aside from the prospects that many people will benefit from stem cell research, whether or not a religious teaching should define or dominate scientific development needs more discussion. What might be more interesting is why the Board at MSKCC accepted the condition in the beginning.

References:

1. The New York Times, September 10, 1995
2. a Wikipedia article on Roman Catholic social teaching
3. www.searchtruth.com