Madam, - The letter of May 9th from Drs Richard Hull and Siobhán O'Sullivan confirms that the view of the Irish Council of Bioethics on person or personhood is the basis for their recommendation that human embryos may be destroyed for the sake of obtaining stem cells from them. They tell us that their views rest on the universally agreed premise that "a person is something to which it is necessary to attribute unity". But they allege also that you cannot attribute that unity to the embryo before the 14th day because it may divide as a single individual and give rise to two or more new individuals.
This fact leads the writers to infer that the unity of the early embryo is not stable; its permanent organic-personal individuality is not yet established. They conclude that at this stage we do not have a full human or a person as a "true individual". They also add that "issues to do with the early embryo are clearly set apart from issues to do with later life. . .[ life] toward its end".
I must disagree on both counts. My coming into being must have something to do with my ceasing to be. I am one and the same human organic living entity throughout my self-existence, even if I could not witness my beginning and I will not witness my funeral. So the key criterion for determining my coming to be must be related to the criterion for determining my ceasing to be, that is, dying. This criterion is the unity of my organic wholeness. In our organic constitution all our powers are embedded and unfold, including that of keeping us one.
When will I be dead, and when did I begin to exist? I will die when my unity as an organism breaks down, when my wholeness disintegrates, even if after death some cells, such as those producing hair and nails, may continue to grow. Death is the dissolution of the organic unity of the human being. I began to exist when my organic wholeness was first established as one cell.
August Comte, the Nobel Prize winning biologist Francois Jacob, the philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe and all biologists I know agree that "in higher animals it is the subordination of the parts to the whole that makes the organism a united system, an individual" (Jacob, The Logic of Life, p. 183). Organic wholeness, organic individuality, organic unity, is maintained in higher animals, humans included, from the first cell to death, from beginning to end.
So what about twinning and the alleged "unstable" individual embryo? The inner mechanisms underpinning the twinning which, very occasionally, emerges at around day 14 are not yet known. But this much is clearly known. Living individual wholes neither divide nor, as such wholes, fuse with other living wholes, although some of their parts (cells, tissues) can do so. This is true of human embryos.
An individual cell, or cells, once separated from the whole embryo, is a fragment that was part of the embryo, and now may become a new whole being itself. To break down the unity of a living whole is to kill it.
The question of individual "unstable embryos" does not arise; stable individuality remains always a feature of every living being considered as a whole. The human individual is a human being and a human person from beginning to end. - Yours, etc,
Dr TERESA IGLESIAS, School of Philosophy, University College Dublin, Belfield, Dublin 4.