Prof. Leon Kass is a man who has the greatest influence on the positions of the President of the United States on science and ethics. His adamant opposition to cloning endangers the future of scientific research in the field. His conservative views, he says, definitely stem from his Jewishness
Anat Balint
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Prof. Leon Kass. I was not aware of how deeply my views on justice and human dignity were influenced by values that are Jewish, by the Jewish education I received
In a soft and patient tone, almost fatherly, Prof. Leon Kass explains the horrifying future he foresees for humanity if the scientists dealing with cloning technology do not stop the mad race forward to what he calls the "post-human era". In the world he sees in his vision, the industrial production of babies, farms for the mass breeding of human embryos and the trade in female eggs, the replication of famous people, the creation of "quality" babies on order from a laboratory and the birth of children who are an exact copy of one of their parents, will be self-evident things that no one will see them as a particularly strange or unusual act. Cass's concerns were liked by President Bush, who pulled the 63-year-old professor from his position as a senior lecturer at the University of Chicago and invited him to chair the White House Advisory Committee on Bioethics.
The 18-member committee, including doctors, scientists, philosophers, lawyers and clergy, is supposed to formulate professional opinions on the ethical and moral questions arising from the progress of biological research, especially that related to the human genome, and submit them to the president. Its recommendations are designed to help the president lead US policy on these issues. The hottest topic on the committee's agenda is cloning technology and embryonic stem cell research.
The committee has already met three times and is expected to issue the official report presenting the position of its members on the cloning issue towards the summer. In the event that they do not reach an agreement, as Cass predicts will happen, several opinions will be presented. Her work is conducted with a certain sense of urgency: every few months studies are published, some of which reach the popular press, reporting on progress in cloning technology and in many countries of the world there is a lively discussion of the moral questions arising from the future potential of this technology. Only recently did French researchers report on their success in cloning rabbits, in addition to the other animals that have already been cloned (sheep, cows, goats, mice, bison and cats). A few months before that, the American company Technology Advanced Cell reported on its attempt to produce stem cells from cloned human embryos, an attempt that failed Nice for now. A few weeks ago, the Russian parliament unanimously decided to ban human cloning for five years, joining many countries with similar legislation. In the USA, Bush invited people of science, religion, philosophy and also disabled people to the White House so that they could explain to the members of the Senate his position calling for a blanket and absolute ban on the use of cloning technology in humans, this with the aim of fending off a compromise bill that is taking shape in the Senate.
In the background echoes the statement of the provocative Italian gynecologist Dr. Severino Antinori from the beginning of April that in his clinic there is a pregnant woman carrying a cloned fetus in her womb. A statement not backed up by any scientific proof or publication.
from birth to produce children
The choice of Cass is not entirely surprising. The articles published about him in American newspapers called him "the philosopher of the president" and also "the guardian of bioethics on behalf of Bush". The two met for the first time in the summer of a year ago, when Bush held a round of meetings with professionals in which he asked to hear their opinion on the issue of cloning.
What he heard from Cass completely aligned with his worldview. Kass, a respected academic, physician, biochemist and philosopher by training, and a professor of political thought and bioethics at the University of Chicago, is known to hold conservative views, especially on issues related to scientific progress. His reasoned and knowledgeable positions on the issue of cloning aligned well with what Bush thought even before and even publicly stated this: cloning technology can lead humanity down a path from which there will be no return and therefore, despite the positive potential that may lie in it, it must be absolutely prohibited.
In a conversation from his current residence in Washington, Kass paints this frightening vision clearly: "Cloning is the first step to a world where procreation will become production. We will have standards of what genetic makeup is desirable and what is not, and children will be created to meet certain standards. It will start with justifications like 'we need to give our children every possible advantage', and 'what's really wrong with making our children a little smarter or healthier', but then it will evolve into only people who meet the standards being accepted, and this will inevitably create inequality and discrimination of different types. Aldous Huxley presented such a picture in the book 'Wonderful New World'.
Huxley wrote about the world we would have if we succeeded in realizing all the human aspirations that exist today. This is a world that has succeeded in eradicating poverty, eliminating diseases and mental illnesses, ending wars, and removing jealousy and sorrow and other negative emotions from it, but the price is dehumanization, the relegation of the human race to a world where there is no science, no love, no art, no friendship, No family, no religion and no self-government. In this world work is boring, amusements and pleasures are trivial and human connections are superficial.
"This is the price humanity will pay for the scientists' attempt to turn the human race into an object of research in order to control nature and alleviate human suffering.
According to Huxley, the real cost of alleviating human suffering is the production of people who may look like us, but at heart are not human at all. Their pleasure comes from drugs, sex is casual and meaningless, and their perfect children are created in bottles. Most people who read the book are permeated by the idea of a class society - people of alpha, beta, etc. But if you look at it carefully, the real differences between these classes are meaningless. Even those who are at the top of society do not have the same things that we humans derive pleasure from today. They spend their time trying to get entertainment after entertainment, but their joy in life is superficial, artificial, and not related to any real reason that makes people happy."
Humanity's ability to restrain
This gruesome description should lead any sane person to immediately support a blanket ban on any research into human cloning, except that the issue of cloning is not so simple and unequivocal, as Kass also knows and points out. It requires the decision makers to decide between the huge potential profit that can grow from it for medicine in the coming years, and opening the door to an unknown future. The question is how much someone believes in the human race's ability to control itself. Cass is a big skeptic about this. This door, he claims, must not be opened even a narrow crack.
"More than anything else, cloning is similar to the Tower of Babel story to me. In this story humans, based on their limited wisdom, aspired to rule the world. In this attempt to make themselves gods, they fell far below the rank of human beings. What does it mean to claim that we know in advance what the perfect genetic makeup is for our children so that they will live worthwhile lives? A child is not a product or a project, he is a gift to be besieged, he is a person to whom we have an obligation. It is not a project through which we fulfill ourselves."
Your position indicates that you believe that the human race is fundamentally evil, that progress will inevitably lead to destruction.
"Not necessarily. One of the reasons that the questions in bioethics are interesting is that it is not a simple case of a war of 'good' against 'evil', as is said about terrorism. In matters of biomedical technology, the bad is mixed with the good. Not only because people with bad intentions may make use of it, but because even the best uses of these technologies can have devastating results that are not known in advance to the users. Huxley's Brave New World is not the product of evil intent. In fact, it is the product of a desire to remove all the worst things from the world."
Cloning technology is indeed not an easy decision to make because it poses the need to choose between a possible benefit, which scientists believe will be reached in the coming years, and a future harm that is not at all certain to actually materialize. It also requires a public whose occupation is not in science to understand exactly what this futuristic project is that teams of researchers all over the world are working on.
Cloning is a process in which a normal cell is taken from the body of an adult and its genetic material (found in the nucleus of the cell) is extracted from it and inserted into an egg cell of a woman whose nucleus has been removed. The scientists are able, with the help of an electric current, to cause such a cell to start dividing into more cells, so that an embryo begins to develop from it. The resulting embryo is identical in its genetic load to the adult person from whom the cell was taken, a kind of identical twin. In fact, it is asexual reproduction because it allows the creation of new life from the genetic material of one person and not two - male and female - as happens naturally. Scientists have so far succeeded in cloning a number of animals, most of which died shortly after birth.
The great interest that scientists show in the cloning process does not stem, as Cass portrays it, from their desire to bring cloned humans into the world, but from the possibility of producing embryonic stem cells in this way. The stem cells are the "treasure" that the scientists have their eyes on. These are cells that can be found in embryos that are only a few days old, cells that are in an initial stage of development, even before they have differentiated into a tissue with a specific function (muscle, liver, heart, skin). They are able to divide and reproduce, and become any type of tissue in the human body. The researchers predict that with the help of fetal stem cell cultures, in the near future they will be able to replace damaged tissues in humans and cure diseases that today have no cure: Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, multiple sclerosis and diabetes. In the even more distant future, there is hope that from the embryonic stem cells it will be possible to develop whole organs in tissue laboratories, thus bringing about a real revolution in the field of transplants.
Today, most of the research is carried out on embryonic stem cells, on normal embryos that remain as "surplus" from the process of in vitro fertilization and are destined for destruction in any case. The significant advantage of embryos created through cloning is that the stem cells that will be produced from them (if this succeeds in the future. Meanwhile, no research team has been able to produce stem cells from cloned human embryos) will be identical in their genetic load to the person from whom they were taken, and therefore there will be no problem of transplant rejection. This is actually a technology of creating "homemade" spare parts. If this scientific vision does come true, a person who needs a kidney will be able to "produce" one for himself through cloning technology.
Therefore, the scientists are careful to distinguish between cloning for reproductive purposes, i.e. the creation of duplicated humans, and cloning for healing purposes - creating an embryo that is only a few days old in order to extract stem cells from it. The liberal position, established by law in many Western countries, opposes the first and supports the second.
The move that Bush is now trying to lead in the US, which Kass is also promoting, is a blanket and complete ban by law on human cloning research. If this move succeeds, it will be an unprecedented restriction of the freedom of research and science.
"I'm not against research, I'm not against technology," Kass explains, "I think science is one of the most wonderful proofs of human intelligence, but the case of cloning is different. There is no justifiable reason to engage in cloning."
Why? Cloning can bring about a real revolution in our ability to cure very serious diseases.
"I am a doctor by training and I know these diseases very well. My mother had Alzheimer's for 13 years. Alzheimer's is common in my family, and with a high probability it is also expected in my future, so there is no need to explain to me what a terrible disease this is. My family has diabetes, heart disease, multiple sclerosis and other chronic diseases, so I cannot be suspected of being insensitive to the horrors of these diseases and I would like to reduce them as much as possible, just like anyone else."
So why are you opposed to research in the field?
"For three reasons: the first is that we know today that there are other means, less problematic, to reach the same results. For example, research on stem cells found in an adult. This is one of the exciting scientific discoveries of recent years, that our body itself has stem cells, for example in the bone marrow, that can become anything. Stem cells from adults are better, after all they are genetically identical to yourself. There are stem cells in the bone marrow that may be turned into bone, muscle, brain, liver.
"Secondly, if you allow cloning for research purposes, you greatly increase the likelihood that after how long the cloned babies' time will come. Here, for example, the embryos that are used today for research on stem cells are those that were created for the purposes of in vitro fertilization in fertility treatment clinics. Once these embryos are already there, then it is possible to use them for any other purpose. The same will happen with cloning. If you support the technology of cloning for research purposes, tomorrow the same technology will allow the duplication of humans. It's the same process - you take the embryo which is only six days old, and then you can use its stem cells, or implant it in the uterus.
"The third reasoning is that it is a step of great significance to produce embryos exclusively for research purposes. It is one thing to use embryos left over from IVF for research purposes, which will die anyway. It is quite another thing to treat a new human life as a natural resource intended to serve other people's lives. Right now scientists are talking about how all they want to do is grow this little embryo to 6-5 days old and harvest its stem cells. But the argument that justifies such an act may in the future justify growing these embryos to an age beyond 7 days. After all, the organs that can be produced from such an embryo will be even more valuable than the stem cells that are being talked about today.
"In a study that has not yet been published, the researchers took cloned cow embryos, implanted them in the cow's uterus, raised them to the age of a few months, and then took kidney tissue from them and showed that this could be used to produce functioning kidney tissue. In the future it will be possible to take a human embryo, put it in the womb of a cow or pig, grow it to the age of several weeks and then harvest its organs. If someone claims that it is permissible to start producing embryos to cure serious diseases, then I can argue - why not grow these embryos a little more, then harvest brain tissue from them and transplant them back into the patient? If Parkinson's can be cured with the help of cloning, then why not grow an embryo up to the age of two months? As soon as you start rolling down this slope, as soon as you claim that human life in its early stages deserves to be a natural resource for curing diseases, you say 'yes' to things that when you get to them you may be horrified by the place you will find yourself, or you may become so used to such a reality that you won't even notice When are you supposed to shout".
Something in the rhetoric that Cass uses is foreign to the Israeli ear, and not by chance. In the tone of his words, in the vision of monstrous acts that will be done to human fetuses, there is a sound that reminds of the religious-Christian debate on abortion that is taking place in the USA. Scientists who deal with bioethics in Israel and read an article he wrote for the 'New Republic' and which was also recently published in "Techelet" - a journal published by the "Shalem" Center, an Israeli research institute associated with right-wing-liberal positions - were surprised to hear that the author was Jewish at all.
How much is your position on cloning influenced by the abortion debate?
"Not at all".
What is your position on the question of abortion?
"I am not opposed to it being legal to abort, but I see it as a very tragic thing. A culture that glorifies abortions instead of lamenting them is a culture that shows a very strange attitude towards its future and towards its offspring."
Do you see the cells of five-day-old embryos as living beings?
"I don't define them as human beings in the full sense, but I don't eliminate their humanity completely either. These early stages of life should be treated with some respect. It's not chopped liver. I don't see destroying fetuses as murder, but I am concerned about the potential it gives us to exploit human life. What you are proposing is that we take embryos, our future, and use them as a resource to extend the life of the current generation. It seems to me very much not in the spirit of Judaism, with all our love for life. In a choice between our desire to prolong life and our desire to multiply and have offspring, the Jewish religion is undoubtedly in favor of the second."
Back to the values of Judaism
Cass was born in Chicago to Jewish parents and grew up in a "Yiddish-speaking home with a socialist ideology," as he describes it. His father was born in Ukraine and immigrated in 1919 to Canada, where he met his mother who immigrated from Poland.
A few years later, the two moved to Chicago, where his father opened a clothing store in partnership with his uncle. Cass: "I grew up in a bilingual environment. At home we spoke Yiddish. My parents were not religious at all and I did not receive any religious education. The only times I visited a synagogue were when my cousins, who were religious, celebrated a Bar Mitzvah. As with many Jews of my parents' generation, socialism was synonymous with Judaism in its secular version. This is the Jewish love of justice. They were all "judges" of the Soviet Union, until they had to sober up."
To what extent do your Judaism and your parents' home influence your attitudes today?
"All these years I was convinced that my views were mainly influenced by classical philosophical sources. I was not aware of how deeply my lectures on justice and human dignity were influenced by values that are Jewish, by the Jewish education I received. The family values at home were distinctly Jewish.
Values that emphasize the importance of children and the required respect for parents, the sanctity of life and humanism in general. These are things I learned at home. My mother had no formal education, she worked in a factory until she gave birth, but she read a lot. She was a very moral person. She had eight other brothers and they all became socialists. This was the generation that distanced itself from religion and was convinced that it had reached enlightenment, unlike my grandfather who was an observant Jew. She also opposed the Zionist idea. She was a proud Jew, but did not believe that politics should be conducted on an ethnic basis. My father did believe in the Zionist idea."
At the beginning of his career, Cass turned to medical studies and later engaged in research in biochemistry at Harvard. His interest in philosophical questions, especially those related to the progress of science, led him to abandon the first two fields and dedicate himself entirely to an academic career as a professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago. He is a fellow at the "American Enterprise Institute" who published his book "The Ethics of Human Cloning" (written together with James K. Wilson), and behind him is a long line of scientific publications and books dealing with bioethics and political thought. He is now working on completing a book analyzing the political thought in Genesis. His wife is a literature lecturer. They wrote a book together that deals with "courtship and marriage" and taught a course on this subject at the university.
Cas seems to have followed a path somewhat opposite to that of his parents. He came back closer to Judaism, adopted conservative views on a wide range of issues and has strong feelings for his Judaism and Israel, which he has already visited eight times. He follows religiously and "with tears in my eyes" what is happening in Israel, he has friends and relatives in Israel and recently joined the board of trustees of the "Shalem" center. Cass: "When the girls were born, we joined a Conservative community, we started observing Shabbat, and I started studying Judaism.
We wanted them to have a Jewish education and to understand what it means to be Jewish. My older daughter is observant, the younger less so. I look with satisfaction at my daughters and know that my granddaughters will know more about Judaism than Saban knew at that age.
We make sure to celebrate holidays together. Just recently we all celebrated Passover in New York. What started so long ago with Avraham and continues to this day, is probably not given to us to be the last link in the chain. This is perhaps her greatest blessing in my life - the chain in my personal case does not end with me and my wife."
When asked if he defines himself as a conservative, he answers with a laugh: "I am certainly defined that way by others, and maybe there are many things I would like to preserve, but I am also a liberal in many ways." In the late XNUMXs, when the first attempts at in vitro fertilization were made and the public debate about the legitimacy of bringing "test-tube children" into the world arose, Cass was among those who opposed the new technology and predicted that only evil would grow from it.
Maybe what happened to your position on IVF, which in retrospect seems wrong, will also happen to your pessimistic position on cloning?
"Maybe. But what if I'm not wrong? What if I'm right and it won't be possible to repair the damage after it's already been done? What if it is, for example, like atomic energy, or maybe even worse than that? Here we are not changing the external environment but the meaning of being human. You can't say we'll try and see, and in a hundred years we'll decide if it was a successful experiment."
A danger to the future of science
Prof. Michel Rebel from the Weizmann Institute, chairman of the Bioethics Committee of the Israel Academy of Sciences and a member of the UNESCO Bioethics Committee, is among the scientists who led the formation of the liberal Israeli position on cloning. He represents in his views the opposite pole to that of Cass. Not only does he support continued research into cloning for healing purposes, he sees no moral wrong in principle in the future use of cloning as a way to have children.
Kass claims that research on fetal cells can be replaced by stem cells from adults.
"If it was really more effective, then most scientists would have abandoned embryonic stem cells a long time ago. The biological potential of embryonic cells is greater. Bush, the great scientist, knows that it is possible to take cells from an adult and transplant them without them being rejected. He knows things that science does not yet know."
What do you think of Cass's gloomy vision, "Brave New World" style?
"This is a demonization of science, turning it into the source of evil and the devil. As if the purpose of science is to transform man into something else. Science does not operate in a vacuum, it is subject to society's guidelines, individual rights and individual freedom.
One of the things that upset me in Cass's article is the thought 'what if a girl becomes her mother's genetic twin at the age of 20, won't her father rape her?' This is a sick thought. Incest happens anyway, does it need replication to occur? These are people who look for the bad, the dark and the pornographic. I have faith in man, science and religion. The whole idea of confiscation, outlawing, outrages me. Is it possible to set limits, but to ban it completely, and above all - to ban research? This makes science the enemy of morality, instead of finding the right balance between the two."
What will be the impact of such a law, if it is indeed accepted in the USA in the end?
"If it passes, it will have serious consequences for research in the field. Many researchers all over the world live on American research grants and such a law will bring them to an end. This will have a sweeping impact on the chances that this method will succeed in turning into the medical revolution that today's researchers are predicting."
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