The Ethics Of Human Commodities

Advertising executives have long insisted that "the body sells," at least in our sex-driven society. But now this old adage has taken on new meaning. A quartet of miscreants in the New York City area was recently charged with theft, forgery, and enterprise corruption. The 122-count indictments involved removing body parts from cadavers in nearby funeral homes and forging documentation that the organs and tissues were donated voluntarily. The ring allegedly pilfered heart valves, tendons, skin, and bones. They even crudely stitched up cadavers after inserting PVC plumbing pipes to replace stolen bones. Other corpses remained truncated or were simply cremated. Furthermore, some of the purloined materials transferred to medical patients may have been tainted or contaminated.

The longsuffering American public was pushed over the edge by this ghoulish scheme, and both the law enforcement and media response was swift and decisive. "I think we can agree that the conduct uncovered in this case is among the most ghastly imaginable," declared Rose Gill Hearn, the commissioner of the local Department of Investigation. Brooklyn District Attorney Charles Hynes echoed, "This case is unique in the utter disregard for human decency." He compared the incident to "something out of a cheap horror movie." CNN news referred to the "macabre scandal" of "looting." The Associated Press recounted the "grisly case" in which corpses were "plundered." And ABC News highlighted the appalling character of the "body-part theft plot."

In another recent scandal, Dr. Hwang Woo-suk, an eminent professor from Seoul National University in South Korea, metamorphosed from a stellar scientist into just another falling star. His research team became internationally famous after announcing the successful cloning of human embryos for the sake of "therapeutic" uses (the harvesting of biomedical materials). After the Scientific American hailed Hwang as "research leader of the year," Hwang was dubbed "the Pride of Korea." Prof. Hwang became a celebrated hero and national icon. At one point, 15,000 fans belonged to an "I love HWS" online community.

But then ominous clouds began to gather over his scientific breakthrough, and it started to rain on the biomedical party. News broke that the good doctor had paid women to donate eggs, in violation of professional ethics and international guidelines. Some of these women suffered severe side effects from chemically produced hyper-ovulation. Hwang had even compelled junior researchers on his own scientific team to become egg donors. Moreover, his experiment was far more inefficient than first claimed. According to the Korea Times, he utilized 2221 eggs from 119 women, rather than the 427 ova originally reported.

Yet the media treated these allegations with kid gloves, and the scholarly world continued to defend and laud him. The allegations constituted a "personal tragedy" but didn't "sound like a hanging offense," insisted University of Chicago law professor Richard Bernstein. After all, Hwang "didn't fudge any scientific research." Or so the gullible public assumed. But the unraveling continued, and eventually the fabric of his research lay in tatters, as authorities discovered that the entire experiment was a brazen sham. Dr. Hwang's research team could not prove that they had ever successfully produced any cloned human embryonic stem cells at all. They had even fabricated photographic images and DNA fingerprints to mask their monumental failure.

The buttresses of academic and media support began to crumble. The New Scientist declared that the hoax ranked as "one of the biggest scientific scandals of recent times." The Scientific American affirmed, "We respected that the ethics of accepted practice in this area of science were still somewhat murky, and we declined to judge him too quickly. However, scientific fraud is an unforgivable offense against the enterprise of research." When Dr. Lee Wang-jae, a fellow Korean scientist, learned of the disgrace, he waxed Rooseveltian in his public response: "We can declare today as a day of national infamy." The president of Seoul National University apologized for the research team's "unforgivable academic crime" that left an "indelible stain" on science.

Is there any relationship between these New York City and South Korean cases? To be sure the legal transgressions and professional breaches differed in the two instances. Nevertheless, there may be an underlying connection. Our generation has turned human components into commodities to be bought and sold. In New York, compliant funeral directors notified Mastromarino when "they had a body that they could cut up without anyone knowing." After he paid them $1,000 a corpse, he turned around and collected an average of $7,000 from each "investment."

In the Korean case, the national government generously financed the research team, hoping for economic benefit and international acclaim. "There is tremendous pressure to be first," explains Adil E. Shamoo, a biomedical ethicist at the University of Maryland. "If you do something first, all the money and fame will come to you. All that is an obvious seduction for doing something like this." Prof. Hwang received over 381 million dollars from state and private sources, and the substantial monetary incentive led to undue pressure and eventually to the fraudulent misappropriation of funds. "The government is most responsible for creating the Hwang idol," claimed Jang Sung Ik, chief editor of Environment and Life. "It gave people an impression that Hwang's technology was a goose that lays golden eggs."

If one analyzes the two scenarios objectively (apart from emotional ties attached to the deceased), one recognizes that the looted individuals in New York were only competent decision-makers in a previous, ante-mortem state. And cryogenically frozen human embryos could theoretically exhibit such a conscious will in the future. Yet neither cadavers nor zygotes are currently capable of deliberative self-determination or neurological sensation of pain, and a corpse is manifestly more "lifeless" than a developing embryo.

Therein lies the irony. The commissioner of the city Department of Investigation claimed that the New York case "was shockingly callous in its disregard for the sanctity of human remains." Exactly. Everyone agrees that the New York tissue vultures were hovering over the lifeless remains of those who were already dead. The "therapeutic" gleaning from cadavers involved those who-by all accounts-were only previously living persons. Meanwhile a debate rages within our contemporary society concerning whether human embryos qualify as full "persons." On a scientific level, they are undeniably growing and maturing-they are biologically "alive." Embryonic stem cell harvesting includes the discontinuation of this biological life as a necessary prerequisite.

Human embryos are merely unfolding the genetic blueprint for full maturation that they have possessed since fertilization. The "therapeutic" utilization of embryos involves the dissolution of a homo sapiens at a specific stage of development that is simply one phase along a universal continuum that all human persons must equally traverse. As Dr. Günter Virt has argued, "Human embryonic stem cells and also embryonic stem cell lines are excluded from patentability because we cannot get embryonic stem cell lines without destroying an embryo and that means without use of embryos. This use as material contradicts the dignity of an embryo as a human being with the derived right to life." In the case of cloning, these human embryos are being industrially and commercially produced solely as instrumental means to a utilitarian end for the benefit of others.

By Paul Anthony
Nov 16, 2006, Post Chronicle.