Life extension and its price. (Letters).(Letter to the Editor)

SIR: The elder Madame Bovary thought that her daughter-in-law's faults of character, and their appalling outcomes, were the result of reading too many novels. Readers of Russell Blackford's "Life Extension and its Enemies" (December 1999) may be tempted to find in it illustrations of the dangers of reading too much science fiction.

We should not be too hard on him for being interested in extending the span of human life; most of us have a preference for dying later rather than sooner, and show at least some sporadic interest in diet, exercise, medical treatment, aircraft maintenance, boat radios, and other means of putting off the evil day. But equally, most of us have some idea of what would be an excessive moral price for the extension of our lives, and would hope that, if given the opportunity to pay an excessive moral price for a few more years of life, we would find the strength to refuse. Organ transplant practice may suggest some limits.

Blackford includes organ transplants in a list of innovations that we readily accept. He does not specify which we he has in mind here, and he may need to restrict the circle of ready acceptors to people who don't know much about what goes on in a process that is already being called organ procurement. Readers of Peter McCullagh's Brain Dead, Brain Absent, Brain Donors: Human Subjects or Human Objects (1993) may refuse to extend their lives by accepting a transplanted organ, unless they can be assured that the "donor" of the organ is really finished with it, that is to say, unless he is actually dead and not merely metaphorically dead, "brain dead". If the patient were to consent to the transplant, he would be making himself an accomplice in, and the chief beneficiary of, the killing of the organ "donor", who would die of what McCullagh calls exsanguination when the organ was removed.

The objection to this instance of life extension is, of course, a moral objection and nothing else, and Blackford is visibly irritated by people who raise moral objections to what he calls "radical technologies". He speaks of "frightened resistance", "noble-sounding appeals to ethical and pseudo-ethical concepts", "self-appointed moral guardians", "moral panic", and so on. But expressions of irritation are not argument, not even bad argument. (Why was this piece published under the heading Argument?) If Blackford wants to win the objectors over, he will have to show them that their objections are unfounded. But he is unlikely to achieve this as long as he gives no hint that he even understands what it is that they are objecting to.

What some of them are objecting to is that the process of becoming "more comprehensively transhuman", and in particular "the possibility that ageing can be defeated", will begin with research using human embryonic cells, in particular stem cells. Such research, which is already taking place, is destructive of the embryo from which the cells are taken, because it leaves that embryo in a condition unfit for implantation. It is simply washed down the sink.

Biologically, an embryo of any species is simply another member of that species early in its life span. It is genetically complete, as complete as any member of the species, of any age. All the genetic information that identifies the individual and ...