Machines Like Us – Science News

By Sam Harris

Stem cell research is one of the most promising lines in biology, to generate medical therapies. It is not being funded at the Federal level for reasons that are religious. We have this idea that is based on rather vague notions of theology, that in every fertilized ovum there is a soul, and you can't privilege the interest of one soul over another -- even if one is in a Petri dish and the other is in a man with Parkinson's disease.

A lot has been said about science not being able to answer questions of morality. Well, I think this is a question of morality that science has answered. If you look at the details: if you look at the human embryos that are destroyed in stem cell research. What is a three day old human embryo? It is a collection of a hundred and fifty cells. That may sound like a lot of cells; to lay people it does. But there are a hundred thousand cells in the brain of a fly. Now it seems to me, if our concern is about suffering in this universe, it is rather obvious that we should be more concerned about killing flies than about killing three-day-old human embryos. This may sound like a very provocative claim; I would argue that it shouldn't, if you look at the details.

Now many people of course will argue that the difference between a fly and a three-day-old human embryo is that a three-day-old human embryo is a potential human being. This runs into problems. Every cell in your body, given the right manipulations -- every cell with a nucleus -- is now a potential human being. Literally, every time you scratch your nose, you have committed a holocaust of potential human beings. So the argument for a cell's potential doesn't get you anywhere.

But let's take this a little bit further. Let's say we grant it that every three-day-old human embryo has a soul worthy of our moral concern. There are other problems that await this description. First of all, embryos at this stage can split into what we call identical twins. Is this a case of one soul splitting into two souls? Embryos at this stage can fuse into what we call a chimera. Many people in this room could have developed in this way. Now I suspect that there are theologians trying to figure out what has happened to the extra human soul in such a case.

It's time we realize that this arithmetic of souls doesn't make any sense. It's intellectually indefensible, but it's morally indefensible given that these notions really are prolonging the scarcely endurable misery of tens of millions of human beings. And because of the respect we accord religious faith -- not even just people of faith, even advocates of stem cell research accord this faith respect -- we can't have this dialogue in the way that we should.

So I submit to you that if you think that the interests of the blastocyst -- a three-day-old human embryo -- may trump the interests of a little girl with spinal cord injury, or a person with full body burns, your moral intuitions have been obscured by religious metaphysics. And this is a kind of blindness that is very well subscribed in our society, and is a blindness that goes by another name: it goes by the name of religious faith. And we have been cowed into respecting it.

From Sam Harris' talk at the Beyond Belief 2 conference.