ANT-OAR REDUX!

The debate continues to rage in the latest press release from the American Life League:

C. Ward Kischer, PhD, human embryology professor emeritus, and Fr. Joseph Howard, M. Div., of American Life League, have issued the following statement regarding their analysis of an Altered Nuclear Transfer-Oocyte-Assisted Reprogramming (ANT-OAR) process proposed by Dr. William Hurlbut. This process, by which an experimental protocol would generate presumed pluripotent cells, but presumably not human embryos for research, raises many serious moral concerns and should be especially troubling for Catholics in the field of science. Dr. Kischer and Fr. Howard address the moral concerns of the proposal and reiterate the teachings of the Catholic Church when dealing with such delicate matters involving the gift of human life.

The problem with the argument these gentlemen are advancing lies primarily in this statement:

C. Ward Kischer, Ph.D., states that, “It appears that within an experimental protocol of ANT-OAR, through cloning, not all in the progeny of blastomeres may become genetically modified and therefore would likely be totipotent. Such a totipotent blastomere would indeed be equivalent to a human zygote who is a human embryo.”

It's unclear how Kischer has arrived at the conclusion that "...not all in the progeny of blastomeres may become genetically modifed and therefore would likely be totipotent." Is he redefining what it means to be totipotent or what it means to be a blastomere? Has he done experiments that confirm his assertion? I kinda doubt it. If anyone knows if such experiments have taken place, do let me know! I'm always ready to stand corrected! The quotes from Donum Vitae don't apply to this procedure if, in fact, no human embryo is involved, and I think this seems to be the case... because what we DO know leads us to believe that it's not even possible for a real blastomere to be generated from ANT-OAR.

In an unpublished paper, Fr. Nicanor Austriaco, OP explains why:

For our analysis, the definitive question that arises is the following: Does the absence of the maternally imprinted gene products that are only produced when genes are inherited from the father impact the system dynamics of the whole parthenote ab initio substantially changing it so that the parthenote becomes a tumor, or does their absence only lead to a defective part of an embryo that becomes a tumor eventually killing the whole?

In response, we return to a key study, already mentioned above, that has shown that the absence of both paternally and maternally imprinted genes impacts the development of the embryo from the very beginning at the two-cell stage.19 Moreover, the absence of the maternally imprinted molecules impacts that parthenote at the level of the whole since the scientific evidence suggests that the imprinted genes regulates the overall number of cells that develop in the blastocyst. In addition, another study has demonstrated that the organization of a parthenote differs from the organization of a normal embryo from the very start: In normal development, when the single-celled mouse zygote divides into two cells, these two cells, called blastomeres, are already not identical. One of the two cells divides ahead of its sister and tends to contribute most of its cellular descendents to the embryo proper, whereas the other, later dividing cell, contributes cells predominantly to the extra-embryonic tissue including the placenta.20 However, in contrast, when a single-celled mouse parthenote divides into two cells, these two cells do not behave in the way that normal blastomeres would behave.21 The first cell that divides does not necessarily contribute its descendents to the embryo proper.This is a small but significant difference in organization that points to the difference between the parthenote and the normal embryo at the very earliest stages of the development. In sum, all of this data suggests that the forces that lead to tumor formation are already present at the earliest stages of embryonic development. In other words, the system dynamics of the parthenote as a whole already differs from the system dynamics of the normal embryo since normal embryos do not become teratomas. Like the complete mole, a parthenote is not an embryo.

Whether or not OAR results in a parthenote has to be confirmed through non-human experimentation. Fr. Austriaco's explanation makes it clear that the material conditions necessary for the existence of a human embryo simply aren't present in the product of OAR. What remains to be done is experimental verification of this conclusion, first with enucleated non-human eggs and then, if successful, on enucleated human eggs.

The entire press release from ALL can be read here...

The text of the Joint Statement from the Catholic ethicists can be found here...

The link to the White Paper from the President's Council on Bioethics can be found here...

Director of Vatican Observatory speaks out

Fr. George Coyne, SJ, the director of the Vatican Observatory, has written an opinion piece in the latest issue of The Tablet. He takes issue with Cardinal Christoph Schönborn of Vienna over the issue of evolution. An excerpt:

...There appears to exist a nagging fear in the Church that a universe, which science has established as evolving for 13.7 x 1 billion years since the Big Bang and in which life, beginning in its most primitive forms at about 12 x 1 billion years from the Big Bang, evolved through a process of random genetic mutations and natural selection, escapes God’s dominion. That fear is groundless. ... Perhaps the following picture of God’s relation to the created universe, as that universe is seen by science and interpreted by a religious believer, may help to assuage that fear. In the universe, as known by science, there are essentially three processes at work: chance, necessity and the fertility of the universe. The classical question as to whether the human being came about by chance, and so has no need of God, or by necessity, and so through the action of a designer God, is no longer valid. And so any attempt to answer it is doomed to failure. The fertility of the universe, now well established by science, is an essential ingredient, and the meaning of chance and necessity must be seen in light of that fertility. Chance processes and necessary processes are continuously interacting in a universe that is 13.7 x 1 billion years old and contains about 1022 stars. Those stars as they “live” and “die” release to the universe the chemical abundance of the elements necessary for life. In their thermonuclear furnaces stars convert the lighter elements into the heavier elements. There is no other way, for instance, to have the abundance of carbon necessary to make a toenail than through the thermonuclear processes in stars. We are all literally born of stardust.

I think Fr. Edward Oakes makes a more coherent statement....but Fr. Coyne does make some good points!

Catholics and Evolution

(Image found here...)

For those who are following the current hubub over some comments made by Cardinal Schönborn on evolution and the Church, here is an excellent interview on the issue from Fr. Edward Oakes, SJ: Part 1, and Part 2.

An excerpt :

For one thing, the Church has no "doctrine" on evolution, any more than it has a doctrine on tectonic plates or a magisterial teaching on how human consciousness arises from the electrical firings inside the neurology of the brain. These matters are both beyond the competence of the magisterium and are irrelevant to salvation, anyway.

Secondly, even if the magisterium did have an official teaching on evolution, it does not officially revise its "views" on matters of science by having a cardinal, however "leading," writing an article "in propria persona" -- on his own behalf -- and using an op-ed piece in a secular newspaper to boot.

That said, I believe that Cardinal Schönborn's essay "Finding Design in Nature" in the July 7 issue of the Times makes a valid point, roughly the reverse side of the coin of what Pope John Paul II said in his now-famous letter to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences in October of 1996.

John Paul said at the time that "evolution" -- which, as Cardinal Schönborn rightly notes, the Holy Father left undefined -- can no longer be considered merely a "hypothesis" because so much data have now come in to confirm the theory.

The problem is that this very short letter brought some misinterpretations of its own in its wake -- because of the obnoxious way some Darwinians like to hijack the word "evolution" for their own atheistic purposes -- and it is those false conclusions, as I see it, that the cardinal was trying to warn against.

But, no, I do not see the cardinal's quite legitimate warning as a "new chapter in the evolution-vs.-creationism debate."

First of all, if "creationism" means six-day creation as a few Christian fundamentalists still hold, then there is no chance in the world that the Catholic Church will join that cause. But "creationism" can also refer to the total ontological dependence of the universe on God's creative act of will, and nothing in the theory of evolution can threaten that essential doctrine of the Catholic faith.

Remember that, according to St. Thomas Aquinas, even if the world happens to be temporally eternal, such an eternity of time would not undermine the created contingency of the world, utterly dependent on God's free decision to create it.

Another excellent read on the issue is found here... an interview of Professor Nicola Cabibbo, president for the past 12 years of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences.

An excerpt :

NCR: What did you think of The New York Times article by Cardinal Christoph Schönborn of Vienna on evolution?

Cabibbo: Two things struck me, one positively and the other negatively. Positively, it opens a very interesting discussion. But I cannot agree with the way he handled the address of John Paul II to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences in 1996. I don't know if the problem was in a bad translation from German, but he calls it "vague and rather unimportant." I've never considered it that way, in fact I have always considered it very important. Not only for the now famous statement, that evolution is "more than a hypothesis," but also for what comes next: "It is indeed remarkable that this theory has been progressively accepted by researchers, following a series of discoveries in various fields of knowledge. The convergence, neither sought nor fabricated, of the results of work that was conducted independently is in itself a significant argument in favor of this theory," the Pope said. With these words the Pope demonstrated a clear understanding of the scientific method, on how an hypothesis can be transformed into a widely accepted fact. This allocution is in fact a very articulated expression of the thought of the late John Paul II.

Good stuff! Go read the rest and copy it to your harddrive!

Jesus and Evolution

The latest issue of Theology and Science is now out, and it's theme is evolution. Here is an excerpt from the editorial by Robert John Russell...

My own view is that God does act within nature and that Darwinian evolution is the result. Note, however, this is a theological claim, not a scientific one. Belief in God can inspire scientists to pursue specific scientific research proposals, but such research cannot include reference to God and remain within science. What this means is that teaching ID in public schools is not a matter of fairess to competing theories since ID is not an alternative biological theory. It is at most a theological claim in disguise. The worst problem is that ID proponents endorse this disguise by not telling us what they mean by agency. This strategy offers an apparent apologetic hope to believing Christians but it fails to deliver on that hope. This makes Christianity seem foolish to agnostic scientists who might otherwise have listened to us, and it promises only eventual disappointment to Christians who believe in it.

This is a pretty good issue...don't miss it!

Gargoyles R Us!

Now how kewl is this? Hat tip to Plato's Stepchild for the lead. Here's a place to get your Gargoyle...

"Legend has it that gargoyles ward off evil spirits - are any protecting your castle and loved ones?"


Don't miss the Gargoyle Information Page!

Scotty Beams Up

The venerable James Doohan died today at the age of 85. He was a likable cuss, known to me only through watching Star Trek as a wee lad. The quote from the article found here sums him up, I think:

Once, at a convention of astronomers, James Doohan was asked what it felt like "to be beamed." The actor who'd abided by the order, "Beam me up, Scotty," countless times on the Star Trek set reported that it was "very pleasurable."

He was a class act! Fare thee well, Scotty!

(Picture found here...)

Stem Cell Research (ANT)

For those following the proposal by the President's Council on Bioethics to develop a procedure that would yield embryonic stem cells without killing any embryos, here is a link to the text of The Production of Pluripotent Stem Cells by Oocyte Assisted Reprogramming - Joint Statement. Here is an excerpt from it:

As described in the President's Council on Bioethics's recent White Paper, altered nuclear transfer (ANT) is a broad conceptual proposal for producing pluripotent stem cells without creating and destroying embryos. In the description set forth below, we outline a research program for a form of ANT that should allow us to produce pluripotent stem cells without creating or destroying human embryos and without producing an entity that undergoes or mimics embryonic development. The method of alteration here proposed (oocyte assisted reprogramming) would immediately produce a cell with positive characteristics and a type of organization that from the beginning would be clearly and unambiguously distinct from, and incompatible with, those of an embryo. Incapable of being or becoming an embryo, the cell produced would itself be a pluripotent cell that could be cultured to establish a pluripotent stem cell line. Significantly, this cell would not be totipotent, as a zygote is.

The joint statement is endorsed by a panel of ethicists, which includes William May, Fr. Nicanor Austriaco, OP, Germain Grisez, William Hurlbut, Fr. Kevin T. FitzGerald, S.J., Fr. Kevin Flannery, S.J., Edward J. Furton, Alfonso Gomez-Lobo, John M. Haas, John F. Kilner, Patrick Lee, Fr. Gonzalo Miranda, L.C, Archbishop John J. Myers, Fr. Tad Pacholczyk, and Fr. Thomas Williams... all who endorse the ANT procedure known as oocyte assisted reprogramming.

There is a page set up at Communio, which has several arguments against the proposed procedures, as well as some rebuttal. PLEASE NOTE! Communio does not endorse the joint statement.

Dragon

I took this at the Chinese New Year Parade 2004, in SF.

So long, Sandy!

Here are links to some good articles dealing with the departure of Sandra Day O'Connor.

Sandy! Thanks for the good work!

Farewell to Sandy Baby!, by James J. Kilpatrick

Two Cheers for Sandra Day O'Connor, by Mark Moller of the CATO Institute

Kelo is the Key to the new Supreme Court, by Steve Feinstein

Ferry Building Clock Tower

This is one of the most well known and photographed landmarks in San Francisco. I took it the night a group of us went to watch the Chinese New Year Parade, in 2004. Loads of fun... :)

Here's a link to some history of the place...

Sutro Tower

Here is a picture of Sutro Tower, which nearly got me run over as I took it. I was driving around today, looking for a good way to land on Irving street and this jumped out at me as I drove down Masonic (I think it was). I looked for a place to park and found one really soon ... nearly took out a telephone pole as I was parking (up on the curb before I knew what I was doing). I get in a hurry because I don't want the lighting and fog to change on me.

I snapped a bunch and this is the one I like the best.

Here is a link to give you the history of Sutro Tower, and there's also a good entry on it at Wikipedia, which points out that it's the tallest structure in San Francisco, even taller than the Transamerica Pyramid.

Candlelight Mass at St. Dominic's

Here's a nice atmospheric shot of the friars setting up the candles for their candlelight mass. They sing Taize music most of the time. It's late for a mass (9:00pm) so everyone seems to sing under their breath... kinda like they don't want to wake the friars in the priory who are already sleeping. ;> More pics to be found at my website.

St. Mary's (Old Cathedral)

This is the old cathedral of San Francisco. I took this without a tripod, thus it's nice and blurrfuzzy.

In photography, everything looks best in black & white, in spite of what Paul Simon thinks. Sorry, Paul...

I have a lot more photos at my website. Click on "Gallery".

Give the Heave-Ho to Kelo!

For those of you following the Kelo v. New London fiasco, wherein the Supreme Court ruled that the powers of eminent domain can now be stretched to the point where private property can be seized by a city to turn it over to commercial developers, below are some good sources that cover what this may mean for Church property as well as religious owned property (ie, convents, monasteries).

This isn't just a threat to people who own homes. Property owned by churches and religious is tax-exempt. Therefore, this property is very very vulnerable to confiscation by the state for purposes of redevelopment. There is a LOT of very valuable property owned by churches and religious... prime real estate...and the history of eminent domain abuse is literally peppered with seizures of church property.

Mirror of Justice; The Reality Check; Professor Bainbridge; The Seventh Age;

Here are some pertinent legal docs:

Amicus Curiae filed with the Supreme Court by the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty

Supreme Court Collection (Opinion, Concurrence and Dissent)

If you need convincing that this might happen, here's an example, pulled from the Amicus:

In Normandy, Missouri, the Sisters of the Good Shepherd own a large parcel that serves as a convent, retirement home for aged sisters, and a shelter for drug-addicted women. The city, however, was not content with the good deeds of the sisters and instead sought to take the religious complex and replace it with a $53 million retail and commercial development. See D. Paul Harris, Nuns in Normandy Get Ready for Fight Over Redevelopment; Sisters Say Their Area Is Lovely and City's Plan Seems "Ill-Conceived," ST. LOUIS POST- DISPATCH , July 29, 2002 at 1

Legislation is reportedly being proposed in the US Senate (as of today, the 27th) to nullify this madness... so we really need to keep our eyes on this one.

Danforth holds forth

I've admired John Danforth, beginning from the time he served as a Senator from Missouri. He came to the fore in the public arena when he was a swing vote during the confirmation of Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court. His replies to reporters, who would crowd around him as he emerged from the senate druing the vote, were interesting... but what was even more interesting was watching him as he interacted with the press. He would look around the room as the questions were asked and then occasionally land his gaze upon the questioner... and the look he always seemed to have was a "are you serious?" kind of look. He always answered the questions carefully, however, and his answers were always articulate and thoughtful. His vote and support apparently helped Thomas into the Supreme Court and I have never forgotten that.

He has penned a great editorial, which originally appeared in the NY Times on the 17th of June, dealing with the Christian right and Christian moderates. It's very good, very thoughtful, and something I'd like to hear more often.

OpenSolaris!

Solaris is now Open Source!

From the website:

The OpenSolaris project is an open source operating system, a community development effort and a place for collaboration and conversation about OpenSolaris technology. It is aimed at developers and users who want to develop and improve operating systems. The OpenSolaris technology represents cutting edge operating system design, but the innovation is just getting started!

HEY! Build your own Operating System! Huzzah!

The Legal Death of Terri Schiavo

This article, found at First Things and written by Robert T. Miller, a new professor of law at Villanova University School of Law, is the best treatment that I've seen on the Schiavo fiasco. He nails it on the head by identifying what was wrong with that mess and where we need to go from here, if we care about it.

Here is an excerpt:

In short, the courts followed the law precisely when they decided that none of Terri Schiavo’s rights under the Constitution and laws of the United States had been violated. How then could the result be so unjust? The answer is perfectly simple: The substantive laws of Florida expressly authorize a murderous result. Those laws, like the laws of most states, expressly provide that a guardian may starve to death a ward in a persistent vegetative state, defined in Florida to mean “a permanent and irreversible condition of unconsciousness in which there is (a) the absence of voluntary action of any kind, [and] (b) an inability to communicate or interact purposefully with the environment.” Substantively unjust laws, enforced in accordance with their terms and by due process of law, lead to substantively unjust results.


Laws authorizing a guardian to starve to death a ward are profoundly immoral, even as applied to those who would have wanted to die; we do not accommodate suicides. But in hundreds of cases around the country every year, such laws are enforced, and hundreds of people die like Terri Schiavo. The only extraordinary thing about the Schiavo case is that her parents have done everything in their power to prevent her death, with the result that Schiavo has received much more process and much more publicity than others to whom the same thing has happened. One commentator described the Schiavo case as the “crime of the century.” In fact it is a banal, run-of-the-mill crime of a kind that happens every day in the United States.


And for this, we cannot blame the courts. The fault lies not in our judges but in ourselves, for we have created a society in which the law allows the strong and healthy to determine that some of the weak and infirm have lives not worth living and then to kill them.

The remainder of the article very carefully covers the whole legal process and does an excellent job of illuminating a very emotional subject... something that needs to be done for such a vitally important issue.

Traitor's Gate, Watergate

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Revised: How to Harvest Stem Cells Without Losing Your Soul

I need to repost this in order to update it with some information. I have been reading about this ever since I posted it and I now have to say that the Wired story contains a factual error. The story reports that Dr. Hurlbut is in favor of "altering cloned embryos" in order to harvest embryonic stem cells and this is incorrect. The process he does advocate is Somatic Cell Nuclear Transfer, and the difference is explained in this entry found at the website of the American Association of Medical Colleges. The difference is that in SCNT you alter an unfertilized egg, NOT an embryo, and Hurlbut is proposing to use this process to produce an artificial teratoma, a sub-organism that contains embryonic stem cells. A teratoma is a naturally occuring tumor that will sometimes grow from an egg or sperm cell. The story is pretty good otherwise, but this factual error is huge... very huge, as anyone knows who has been following the debate over the ethical implications of such research.

According to the story "How to Farm Stem Cells Without Losing Your Soul" in the June Issue of Wired, Stanford scientist William Hurlbut has found a way to harvest embryonic stem cells without destroying embryos. Here is an excerpt:

William Hurlbut clicks his laptop, and an x-ray pops up on the projection screen behind him. It's a picture of a tumor in a woman's ovary - a ghostly blob floating near the spine. In the middle are several strange, Chiclet-shaped nodules. "Those white opacities," Hurlbut says, "are actually fully formed teeth."

A few audience members blanch. Though we're in an ordinary conference room in Rome, it feels like church. The seats are filled with some of the Vatican's top thinkers, including a dozen men in clerical dress, a nun in a flowing brown habit, and a Dominican priest whose prayer beads quietly clatter. Hurlbut, a bioethicist from Stanford, has traveled here to tell them about a new way to create human embryonic stem cells.

I'm not sure that the solution is one that "even the Vatican will love", but at least this shows there are some scientists out there trying to find an ethical solution to it all... which seems to me to be a good thing. I do think, however, that what he is proposing is morally acceptable.

Paul Ricoeur, Feb 27, 1913 - May 20, 2005

Just discovered this, a bit late!

Paul Ricoeur, who died on Friday aged 92, was one of the most distinguished and prolific philosophers of his generation and published extensively on subjects ranging from structuralism, theology and phenomenology to psychoanalysis and hermeneutics; he was chiefly preoccupied with what is arguably the greatest philosophical theme - the meaning of life.

Full details are found here...