Crossing the Nuremberg Line
William L. Saunders on Cloning & Human Dignity
On February 13, the principal author of the new report on cloning from the National Academy of Science (NAS) told the President’s Bioethics Advisory Council that it was impermissible (at least at the moment) to proceed with what he called “reproductive cloning,” i.e., cloning that brings the clone to birth, but that it was okay to proceed with “therapeutic cloning,” i.e., cloning that kills the clone by experimenting on it. By what standard did Professor Irving L. Weissman and his NAS colleagues judge reproductive cloning to be impermissible and the other kind okay?
Reproductive cloning, they maintained, was simply too dangerous—at present. The risk to the cloned subject was too great. The actual cloning process is difficult to manage: Most clones in animal trials are defective, or indeed die. Ian Wilmot, the scientist who cloned Dolly the sheep, says that only one to five percent of embryos eventually result in the live birth of animals, and those that are born are plagued with obesity, lung and kidney problems, immune system failure, and so on.
Weissman’s Standard
But why does that make cloning impermissible? Sure, the risks are significant. But how did Weissman know that this degree of risk is an impermissible risk? His standard is the Nuremberg Code. The Nuremberg Code sums up the ethical tradition of Western civilization and provides an excellent guide to what constitutes ethical scientific research involving human beings. As Weissman himself noted, the fifth article of that code states: “No experiment should be conducted where there is an a priori reason to believe that death or disabling injury will occur.” (It continued: “except, perhaps, in those experiments where the experimental physicians also serve as subjects.”)
The Nuremberg Code was created by the Nuremberg Tribunal, convened to judge the Nazi leadership and their allies for the atrocities they committed in World War II. It was born, if one may use that term, from the outrage of the civilized world at the genocide, and other crimes against humanity, committed by the Nazi regime. As such, it is the almost universally acknowledged standard today for medical experimentation on human beings.
The Nazis killed six to nine million people in their concentration or “death” camps, most of them Jews. Nazi laws had already defined Jews and other “undesirables” as non-persons. Eventually these “non-persons” were herded into the camps for extermination. But before the death camps were even constructed, the Nazis had engaged in an extensive campaign of euthanasia against the sick and handicapped.
The crucial work justifying this was a book published in 1920, called The Permission to Destroy Life Unworthy of Life. As made clear by Robert Jay Lifton in his book, The Nazi Doctors, the incurably ill, the mentally ill and feeble-minded, and retarded or deformed children were all regarded as “lives unworthy of life.” The Nazis “medicalized” the idea, maintaining that the destruction of unworthy lives was a “healing treatment.”
The first “Children’s Specialty Department” was established in 1940 after Hitler came to power, under which “all therapeutic possibilities will be administered according to the latest scientific knowledge.” A network of 30 killing areas within existing institutions was set up throughout Germany, Austria, and Poland.
In the extermination camps, Nazi doctors engaged in inexplicably cruel experiments on Jews, Gypsies, Poles, and others. They exposed them to extreme cold to see at what temperature death would occur. They injected them with poisons to see how quickly certain elements moved through the circulatory system. They took twins and subjected them to all manner of terrible conditions to see how genetically identical persons reacted to different conditions.
I called these experiments “inexplicable.” But were they? After all, some of the experiments were designed to preserve life—albeit not the subjects’ lives, but the lives of others, such as pilots, for example, who had to parachute into freezing waters. The ultimate aim of the experiment was to yield a human good, to gain knowledge that would preserve human life. There was, from the Nazi’s point of view, a “greater good” involved.
William L. Saunders is Senior Vice President and Senior Counsel at Americans United for Life.
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