Antonia Tully, blogpost
Finding a cure for cancer is one of the greatest medical endeavours of modern times. Cancer is a scourge, creeping up on people and claiming lives. Treatments are of course improving all the time. But the big challenge is finding a cure for all the cancers which attack so many parts of the human body.
But how far should we go to find these cures? As a pro-lifer, I cannot support any medical research charity which funds research using human embryos. Even if the result is a cure for cancer. This is why I can’t support the leading charity Cancer Research UK.
However, before I put Cancer Research UK under the microscope, let me take you back to 1984 when “The Report of the Committee of Inquiry into Human Fertilisation and Embryology”, commonly known as the Warnock Report, was published. This report recommended that human embryos could be used for experimental purposes up to 14 days. This was greeted as a tremendous step forward for science and medicine. There would be no end to the cures to come out of using tiny human embryos as guinea pigs.
Fast forward to the present day; where are these cures? Nowhere to be seen it seems. What became evident fairly early on is that human embryos are not good material for medical research. Since 1984 adult stem cell research has opened up much more promising avenues. And stem cells taken from adults are, it transpires, far more use in treatments than stem cells taken from human embryos.
Pro-lifers who have written to cancer and other medical charities to enquire whether human embryos are used in the research projects they fund, are invariably told that not one involves human embryos.
Indeed, in a letter to a pro-life supporter dated 16/11/2018, Cancer Research UK stated: “Of the thousands of research projects we currently fund, only one involves human embryos … The embryos used in this research are left over from patients’ fertility treatment and donated by patients”.
It seems that Cancer Research UK doesn’t find human embryos very useful either. However, I still would not want to donate to a charity even if only one in a thousand projects used human embryos. Using human beings, however tiny, as the subjects of medical experiments is as chilling and as wrong now as it was in the middle of the last century.
Cancer Research UK is also closely associated with the Francis Crick Institute. Francis Crick was a scientist who, in 1953, with fellow scientist James Watson discovered the double helix structure of the DNA molecule. Crick believed in eugenics, even suggesting that the Nazis had simply given eugenics “a bad name”, adding that: “I think it is time something is done to make it respectable again” (letter to biochemist Dr John T Edsall on June 10, 1971).
Scientists at the Crick Institute are working on the embryo gene editing technique Crispr-Cas 9, funded by the Medical Research Council (MRC), Cancer Research UK, the Wellcome Trust, UCL (University College London), Imperial College London and King’s College London. In short, Cancer Research UK is part of an alliance funding and supporting experimentation on human embryos.
Do human embryos matter? Yes, they do. They are the smallest members of the human race. Protecting their lives is at the core of SPUC’s work. Cancer Research UK is a charity unworthy of support from those of us who believe that human lives matter.