Prof. Steinberg, winner of the Israel Prize, author of the Encyclopedia of Science and Halacha, said these things in a special lecture in Bar-Ilan, on the occasion of receiving an honorary doctorate from the university * According to him, stem cell research will help in finding a cure for serious diseases such as Parkinson's, diabetes and more
"Unlike the Catholic approach, which forbids research in embryonic stem cells, the Jewish approach actually permits such research." So said Prof. Rabbi Avraham Steinberg, director of the Center for Medical Ethics at the Jerusalem School of Medicine and head of the Institute for Medical Ethics in Shaare Tzedek, who this week received an honorary doctorate from Uni Bar-Ilan.
Prof. Steinberg, who a few years ago won the Israel Prize for Torah Culture for compiling the Encyclopedia of Science and Halacha, said these things this week in a lecture to faculty members and students at Bar-Ilan, on the eve of receiving the prestigious degree.
This approach allowed Israel to actually be at the scientific forefront in the development of stem cells, and some of the major discoveries in the field were made in its laboratories. Steinberg explained that the difference between the approaches in the various religions lies in the religious view that treats the fetus as a person within different periods of time since fertilization.
In the process of producing the stem cells, the researchers are required to destroy 4-5 day old embryos. According to him, the Catholics are trying to prevent stem cell research because according to their belief the soul enters the body the moment the sperm and the egg connect, whether in the womb or in a test tube. In their view, each egg is a potential person who has all the rights and its destruction is considered murder at any stage.
On the other hand, in Judaism there are several opinions on the age of the fetus with rights, but the accepted opinion is 40 days. A second important criterion that allows stem cell research according to Judaism is the condition that the embryo in the test tube does not yet have the potential to become a human being, and is not implanted in a woman's womb. These two reasons lead to the fact that, according to Judaism, surplus embryos from in vitro fertilization can be used.
In his lecture, Prof. Steinberg described how stem cells are produced and the enormous potential these cells have for curing serious diseases, including Parkinson's and diabetes. "If we succeed in finding the mechanism that tells the stem cell which cell to turn into, we can ask it in the case of Parkinson's to turn into a cell that produces dopamine and in the case of diabetes - a pancreatic cell that produces insulin," said Steinberg.
Steinberg also supports medical cloning, in which a cell from an adult is transplanted into a deprogrammed egg, in order to make that egg divide. 4-5 days later, the stem cells are extracted and transplanted after the required change in the donor's body, thus avoiding the risk of tissue rejection. According to him, Israeli law does not prohibit cloning for the purposes of producing stem cells for healing, provided that the embryos created in this way are not implanted in the womb.
In conclusion, Prof. Rabbi Steinberg stated that if this is intended to save the lives of millions of people, it is permissible to sacrifice for this purpose clusters of cells from surplus embryos from in vitro fertilization, especially when they meet the two criteria - the production of the stem cells before the age of 40 days of the embryo and that they will not be implanted in a woman's womb .
Written by Avi Blizovsky for Bar-Ilan University
13 תגובות
you said…. of course
Life
I said utter nonsense. Not only do animals have morals, I would say that there are humans who have less morals than animals, so we have bodies whose job it is to maintain morality.
Haim,
You wrote: "Remember that the minds of those living in life are small and have no room for any morality."
Many animals have larger brains than humans (for example in elephants and whales) and many animals display behavior that we can identify with and consider as moral, especially when it seems that they do not have to behave this way at that moment sometimes in the face of danger to their lives and contrary to their every natural instinct.
For some reason I claim that after the fertilization of the egg, immediately with the first division, meaning there are only two cells, it is a person for all intents and purposes. Deliberate destruction of a fertilized cell is murder for all intents and purposes. Mixing religion into science is fundamentally wrong.
Even if there are scientific elements in religion, there is still no place for religion to influence science.
to Michael Animals have no morals. All their behavior is based on survival, since their judgment is low. Remember that the mind of the living is small and has no place for any morality.
bird:
that your words are horribly nonsensical.
I do not believe in the Jewish religion or any other religion and I am nevertheless a moral person.
I didn't learn it because of religion. I simply have no choice because nature made me this way through many years of natural selection.
Animals also have different levels of morality.
You may think that if it weren't for religion you would become a thief and a murderer, but if that's true - it's only true for you personally.
I know that the religious appropriate themselves and religion a monopoly on morality, but in fact the opposite is true.
A religion whose one of its symbols is Abraham, our father, who was prepared by God's commandment to banish his wife and son to the desert and then slaughter his second son, cannot claim to be moral (among us - after all, the madwoman from Beit Shemesh did exactly the same thing and for the same reasons).
A religion where God commands believers to commit genocide on another people cannot claim morality.
A religion in which God creates homosexual men and commands the believers to murder them cannot claim to be moral.
A religion where God allows the holocaust that harms the innocent cannot claim to be moral.
A religion whose representatives allow themselves to claim morality in spite of all these cannot claim morality.
It is precisely the observance of the "moral" mitzvot of the religion that arouses in a person with a moral conscience all the kidneys.
Daniel, it was Jewish morality that taught the world what morality is.
"To trust in moral matters and justice to the clergy"
There is no doubt that religious morality has advanced us so far and at the height of this morality it is permissible to explode with an explosive in front of an audience (Islam)
Go on murderous expeditions such as the Crusades (Christianity)
and to eliminate different beliefs of other people - idolatry (Judaism)
Some ignorance in one sentence.
The report project:
Really unfairly, and if there were no evidence for this, then precisely the contradictory claims of Judaism and other religions on the subject of this article show that it is unfairly because it is not possible for everyone to be right.
Of course, there are many other reasons for the claim that there is no justice in relying on religion as a moral standard.
In most countries it was forbidden by that religion, so it was banned. The reason is that people trust in moral matters (and rightly so) to the clergy.
If someone wants to copy this article elsewhere, trust them to make sure to omit the last line of copyright along the way.
Avi:
If it was forbidden then - precisely because of the oxymoron you talked about that still controls every element of our lives through religious coercion - the development would have been halted in Israel as well and the application would have been banned - as happened in other countries and as the article states.
Avi Blizovsky:
I see that you are learning lessons and preventing ambiguities about copyright in advance 🙂
And if it was forbidden? So? Besides, what is the absurd oxymoron - "science and law"?
It's just because there are enough Jewish doctors who can convince the rabbis. Without the doctors, it was also forbidden for us.