Colm Fitzpatrick
The Bishop of Elphin has condemned the use of embryos in bio-medical research after US scientists succeeded in editing human genomes to remove mutations like heart disease.
Bishop Kevin Doran, chair of the Catholic Bishops’ Consultative Group on Bioethics and Life Questions, said human embryos were, as part of the research, “being deliberately generated under laboratory conditions with a higher than average risk of congenital heart disease”.
The lab-created, edited embryos which were not allowed to develop beyond a few days, when they comprised a handful of cells, were being “deprived of any other purpose than to be used for research and then disposed of”, the bishop said, adding, “these individual human beings are all the more entitled to protection precisely because they do not yet have the capacity to speak for themselves or to give their consent.”
He cited a recent charter for healthcare workers released by the Vatican that said it was “gravely immoral to sacrifice a human life for therapeutic ends”.