Stem cells, biotechnology, and human rights: Implications for a posthuman future

Hastings Center Report

Volumn 35, Issue 2, 2005, Pages 25-33

  Lauritzen, Paul ^a  

^a JOHN CARROLL UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

AGING; ATTITUDE; BIOGENESIS; BIOTECHNOLOGY; BLASTOCYST; EMBRYO DEVELOPMENT; ETHICS; EUTHANASIA; GAMETE; GENETIC SCREENING; HUMAN; HUMAN RIGHTS; LIFESPAN; MEDICAL RESEARCH; MENTAL HEALTH; MORALITY; POLITICS; PSYCHOANALYSIS; REVIEW; SOCIAL ASPECT; STEM CELL TRANSPLANTATION;

EID: 19544369669     PISSN: 00930334     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/3527760     Document Type: Review

References (48)

1. See E. Parens and L.P. Knowles, "Reprogenetics and Public Policy: Reflections and Recommendations," Hastings Center Report, Special Supplement, 33, no. 4 (2003).
2. See also the report of the Presidents Council on Bioethics, Reproduction and Responsibility: The Regulation of New Biotechnologies, which explores "the intersection of the technologies of assisted reproduction, human genomic knowledge and techniques, and human embryo research" (Washington, D.C.: President's Council on Bioethics, 2004).
3. For exceptions to this generalization, see R.R. Faden et al., "Public Stem Cell Banks: Considerations of Justice in Stem Cell Research and Therapy," Hastings Center Report 33, no. 6 (2003): 13-27;
4. H. Bok, K.E. Schill, and R.R. Faden, "Justice, Ethnicity, and Stem-Cell Banks," The Lancet vol. 364 (July 2004): 118-21.
5. "Testimony before the Presidents Council on Bioethics" (December 13, 2002). Available at: http://www.bioethics.gov/transcripts/dec02/ session5.html.
6. Jennings defines the regime of biopower as the effort to make or remake the world in the realm of the biological. In relation to medicine, it refers to technologies that promise (or have delivered) significant interventions on the human body. See B. Jennings, "The Liberalism of Life: Bioethics in the Face of Biopower," Raritan 22, no. 4 (Spring, 2003): 133-46.
7. On the theme of understanding life forms as manufactured products, see S. Krimsky, Biotechnics and Society: The Rise of Industrial Genetics (New York: Praeger, 1991).
8. C. Waldby and S. Squier, "Ontogeny, Ontology, and Phylogeny: Embryonic Life and Stem Cell Technologies," Configurations 11, no. 1 (2003): 33.
9. See also S. Squier, Liminal Lives: Imagining the Human at the Frontiers of Biomedicine (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2004).
10. S. Squier, Liminal Lives: Imagining the Human at the Frontiers of Biomedicine Ibid, 36.
11. G. Meilaender, "Terra es animata: On Having a Life," Hastings Center Report 23, no. 4 (1993): 25-32.
12. G. Meilaender, Hastings Center Report Ibid., 29.
13. G. Meilaender, Hastings Center Report Ibid., 31.
14. F. Fukuyama, Our Posthuman Future (New York: Farrar, Strous and Giroux, 2002), 70-71.
15. See W. Glannon, "Extending the Human Life Span," The Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 27, no. 3 (2002): 339-54.
16. W. Glannon, "Identity, Prudential Concern, and Extended Lives," Bioethics 13, no. 3 (2002): 276.
17. W. Glannon, Bioethics Ibid., 279-80.
18. L. Kass, "Ageless Bodies, Happy Souls," The New Atlantis 1 (2003): 12.
19. For an account of human rights that disputes this claim, see M. Ignatieff, "Human Rights as Idolatry," in Human Rights as Politics and Idolatry, ed. A. Gutman (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001)
20. M.C. Nussbaum, "Compassion and Terror," Daedalus 128, no. 4 (2003): 10-26.
21. M.C. Nussbaum, Daedalus Ibid., 16. Diana Fritz Cates has criticized Nussbaum's account of compassion, particularly Nussbaum's insistence that compassion requires the judgment that the person suffers undeservedly. Cates notes that this condition is sharply at odds with the understanding of compassion in some Buddhist and Christian traditions.
22. D.F. Cates, "Conceiving Emotions: Martha Nussbaum's Upheavals of Thought," Journal of Religious Ethics 31 (2003): 325-41.
23. Shared possibilities/vulnerabilities can still be crucial, however. Nussbaum offers a subtly different account of the importance of shared vulnerabilities in Upheavals of Thought (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001). See especially pp. 315-21. Thanks to Tom Schubeck for pressing me on this point.
24. M. Midgley, "Biotechnology and Monstrosity: Why We Should Pay Attention to the 'Yuk Factor,'" Hastings Center Report 30, no. 5 (2000): 9.
25. See also M. Midgley, Animals and Why They Matter (Athens, Ga.: University of Georgia Press, 1983).
26. M.C. Nussbaum, "Human Capabilities, Female Human Beings," in Women, Culture, and Development: A Study of Human Capabilities, ed. M.C. Nussbaum and J. Glover (Oxford, U.K.: Clarendon Press, 1995), 72.
27. K. Soper, What Is Nature? Culture, Politics and the Non-Human (Cambridge, Ma.: Blackwell, 1995).
28. K. Soper, What Is Nature? Culture, Politics and the Non-Human Ibid., 75.
29. K. Soper, What Is Nature? Culture, Politics and the Non-Human Ibid., 76.
30. Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought.
31. See also M.C. Nussbaum, "'Secret Sewers of Vice': Disgust, Bodies, and the Law," in The Passions of Law, ed. S. Bandes (New York: New York University Press, 1999).
32. Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought, 347.
33. Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought, Ibid., 350.
34. http://www.patriciapiccinini.net/, accessed December 30, 2004.
35. See R. Kent, "Fast Forward: Accelerated Evolution." Available at: http://www.patriciapiccinini.net/.
36. P. Piccinini, "Artist Statement" (1999). Available at: http://www.patriciapiccinini.net/, accessed December 30, 2004.
37. J.S. Robert and F. Baylis, "Crossing Species Boundaries," American Journal of Bioethics 3, no. 3 (2003): 1-13.
38. For a very interesting study of non-human animals in postmodern art, see S. Baker, The Postmodern Animal (London, U.K.: Reaktion Books, 2000).
39. "GFP Bunny," July 16, 2004, http://www.ekac.org/gfpbunny. html#gfp-bunnyanchor, accessed December 30, 2004.
40. E. Kac, "GFP Bunny." For a discussion of Kac's work, see The Eighth Day: The Transgenic Art of Eduardo Kac, ed. S. Britton and D. Collins (Tempe, Ariz.: Arizona State University, 2003).
41. C. Campbell, "Source or Resource? Human Embryo Research as an Ethical Issue," in Cloning and the Future of Human Embryo Research, ed. P. Lauritzen (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 44.
42. W.S. Merwin captured the danger of this kind of reductionism in a poem entitled, "Dog": "Whatever he was to guard/Is gone. Besides, his glazed eyes/Fixed heavily ahead stare beyond you/Noticing nothing; he does not see you. But wrong:/Look again: it is through you/That he looks, and the danger of his eyes/Is that in them you are not there . . ." in Green with Beasts (London, U.K.: Hart-Davis, 1956).
43. Although he is not discussing stem cell research explicitly, Paul Rabinow's discussion of technological change during the last two decades is helpful. P. Rabinow, French DNA: Trouble in Purgatory (Chicago, Ill.: The University of Chicago Press, 1999), 13).
44. See also L. Sharp, "The Commodification of the Body and Its Parts," Annual Review of Anthropology 29 (2000): 287-328.
45. Waldby and Squier, "Ontogeny, Ontology, and Phylogeny," 46.
46. Donna Haraway has argued that concerns about boundary crossing are reminiscent of racial and immigration discourses of an earlier era. "In the appeal to intrinsic natures," she writes, "I detect a mystification of kind and purity akin to the doctrines of white racial hegemony and U.S. national integrity and purpose." ("Mice into Worm-holes," in Cyborgs and Citadels, ed. G.L. Downey and J. Dumit (Santa Fe, N.M.: School of America Research Press, 1997), 218).
47. C.S. Lewis, "The Abolition of Man," The Abolition of Man (New York: Macmillan, 1947), 81.
48. J. Glover, Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1999).