CYIL vol. 8 (2017)

MARTIN ŠOLC CYIL 8 ȍ2017Ȏ The great stem cell debate, once resonating through the technologically developed world, is now hard to hear. Most countries where stem cell research is performed enacted specific regulation a decade ago and the public might have been appeased by the illusion that iPSCs make the destruction of embryos needless. However, the topic did not lose anything from its importance until today. The ethical questions concerning an embryo-destructive research The ethical debate concerning the stem cell research is very complex and much wider that can be mentioned in this paper. 7 Its importance may be illustrated by the words of Prof. James A. Thompson, who lead a team which derived ESC from human embryos for the first time in 1998: „If human embryonic stem cell research does not make you at least a little bit uncomfortable, you have not thought about it enough. (…) I thought long and hard about whether I would do it.“ 8 However, we may identify two basic ethical problems. The first of them concerns the specific ethics of embryo-destructive research. The second one is the question of the ethical boundaries of medical research in general, such as the risk and benefit ratio in relation to research subjects, the problem of informed consent, 9 or the donation of embryos and gametes. We will discuss below the reflections of both problems in international law regulation of the stem cell research. Since the ethical and legal discussion concentrates mainly on the ESC research, we will discuss primarily this most controversial type of stem cell science. In current ethical literature, there are often identified two basic approaches to the question of human personhood . Both of them comprise a variety of modifications, but they can be used, mainly in a didactic way, to get an overview of the problem. We should specifically point out that our presentation of the concepts will be extremely simplifying and is to be understood only as a very basic introduction to the field. Ontological personalism identifies a human person with a human being. 10 In other words, every human being (i.e. a living creature belonging to the species homo sapiens sapiens) is from its very nature always a human person, regardless of any conditions in which he or she may find himself or herself. 11 This approach is traditionally based on the Christian concept of a human as an individual substance of rational nature: the nature of a human being comprises the potential capacity to rational discernment (even though in some cases this potential capacity will never be developed) and therefore is always a person. 12 The moral 7 See for example ČERNÝ, David, DOLEŽAL, Adam (eds.), Etické a právní aspekty výzkumu kmenových buněk. Ústav státu a práva AV ČR, Praha 2013. 8 KOLATA, Gina. Man Who Helped Start Stem Cell Wars May End It. New York Times. (22 November 2007.) accessed 9 September 2017. 9 For a general introduction to the complex questions of informed consent, see ŠUSTEK, Petr, HOLČAPEK, Tomáš, Informovaný souhlas. Teorie a praxe informovaného souhlasu ve zdravotnictví . ASPI, Praha 2007, p. 199. See also HOLČAPEK, Tomáš, SALAČ, Josef. Informovaný souhlas. In ŠUSTEK, Petr, HOLČAPEK, Tomáš (eds.), Zdravotnické právo. Wolters Kluwer, Praha 2016, p. 232-262. 10 See NELSON, Jennifer. Human Personhood from a Kantian perspective. CedarEthics. (2009, Vol. 8, No. 2), p. 1. 11 See ibid . 12 See DELIO, Ilia, How essential is the human person? University of Notre Dame Blog Network: Contending Modernities. (1 February 2013.) accessed 5 April 2017. ČERNÝ, David, LURIGOVÁ, Martina, Lidské embryo v perspektivně bioetiky. In ČERNÝ, David (eds.), Lidské embryo v perspektivě bioetiky. Wolters Kluwer, CEVRO Institut, Praha 2.

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