Letter
USCCB Letter to the National Institutes of Health regarding Proposed Changes to the NIH Guidelines for Human Stem Cell Research (2016)
USCCB Letter to the National Institutes of Health regarding Proposed Changes to the NIH Guidelines for Human Stem Cell Research and the Proposed Scope of an NIH Sterring Committee's Consideration of Certain Human-Animal Chimera Research, September 2, 2016
On behalf of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (“Conference”), we submit the following comments on a proposal by the National Institutes of Health (“NIH”) to authorize federally funded human/animal chimera research, published at 81 Fed. Reg. 51921 (Aug. 5, 2016).
In the Conference’s view, the dignity and inviolability of human life at every stage of development is a foundational principle of any truly civilized society. The core ethical norms protecting human research subjects, affirmed in the Nuremberg Code and many subsequent documents, reflect this principle. The right not to be subjected to harmful experimentation without one’s express and informed consent is an innate human right, belonging to each and every member of the human family by his or her very nature as a human being. Thus it does not belong to government to recognize this right for some human beings and not for others, or to set aside protection of this right in the name of expanded knowledge or the good of society. Laws or regulations which fail to give full recognition to this fundamental right do not succeed in nullifying the right in question, but only call into question their own moral legitimacy. It is in light of this moral conviction that we offer the following comments.
The government has already crossed a significant moral line by treating the destruction of human beings, at a very early stage of development, as the raw material for allegedly useful human embryonic stem cell (“ESC”) research. Such research has failed to produce treatments for human ailments over the last 17 years, and morally noncontroversial avenues such as adult stem cell and induced pluripotent stem cell research have surpassed ESCs in scientific and clinical benefits. The government now proposes running roughshod over another basic moral principle, however, by injecting human embryonic stem cells into the embryos of various animal species to create beings who do not fully belong to either the human race or the host animal species.