Gene Editing, Bioethics, and Redesigning Humanity with Dr. Prentice

The scariest ideas in bioethics are no longer science fiction: cloning for organs, embryo trait selection, and gene editing pitched as the next “upgrade” for humanity. This week we talk with Dr. David Prentice, longtime scientific researcher and president of the Science Alliance for Life and Technology (SALT), about why basic embryology points to fertilization as the beginning of a new, distinct human organism. 

We also confront how IVF, gene editing, and “sentience” arguments can slide into dehumanization unless science and ethics stay anchored to human dignity. Dr Prentice helps us to ground the whole debate in plain biological facts and clear ethical lines. He shares with us a more hopeful route: somatic gene editing and gene therapy aimed at treating disease in an existing patient without redesigning humanity.

If you care about science, medicine, human rights, and the future of biotechnology policy, this is a conversation to share. Subscribe, leave a review, and send this to a friend, then tell us: where should society draw the line on embryo research and gene editing?

Resources:

https://salt4life.org/

Transcript

The Dark Promise Of Organ Clones

Dr. David Prentiss 0:03

The gene editing aspect rears an ugly head in the fact that there are people now that want to grow clones, but also to edit those clones so that they would not have a brain. They would simply be what they have called organ sacks.

Victor Nieves 0:28

God is the creator of all human life and all science. Pro-abortionists like to paint the pro-life movement as based solely on a religious fervor while they claim to have, quote, the science on their side. Science of embryology teaches us that from the earliest stages of development, the unborn are distinct, living, whole human beings. Human life begins at the very moment of fertilization.

Welcome And Guest Introduction

Victor Nieves 0:55

Welcome to Straight Talk on Life Issues. I'm Victor Nieves, president of Life Issues Institute. Today we're talking about science and human life with our friend Dr. Prentice. He's the president and founding board member of the Science Alliance for Life and Technology, SALT. He has almost 50 years of experience as a scientific researcher, a professor, academic leader, and policy advisor. Well, Dr. Prentice, as always, welcome back to the show. It is such a tremendous pleasure to have you with us. Great to be back with you.

What SALT Does And Why

Victor Nieves 1:34

You know, Dr. Prentice, I'd love to start off today talking a little bit about the work that you're doing with SALT. People may have heard of it. It's the Science Alliance for Life and Technology. You're really doing some amazing work, and I think it's very pertinent to our conversation. Could you tell us a little bit about that?

Dr. David Prentiss 1:50

Well, we're a bunch of geeks, science geeks, and we've worked together in the past. Some of us have been doing this for 50 years, some of our more senior members like me. But uh people with decades of experience, not just doing science, being able to explain it to others. And we're seeing all these challenges come up, especially more recently, uh, especially for nascent human life, which is what we focus on, the very earliest stages of human life. And we said, you know, we kind of need to get together in an organized way. And so we formed the Science Alliance for Life and Technology, SALT. We've got our website at least started now at SALT4Life.org, SALT for life, and trying to season the debates with a little bit of truth about the science and ethics. So we've already done a congressional briefing just in the last couple of months, done a number of different interviews, including the podcast with you folks, and written articles and trying just to help, especially the public, but also the policymakers, understand the value of every human life, how it should be protected and not used for spare parts, and what some of the science that is going on is, what we should be pursuing as an ethical type of treatment versus things that destroy human life.

Pro Life Without Religious Assumptions

Victor Nieves 3:18

You know, Dr. Prentiss, there are many of us who are adamant defenders of the unborn who happen to be religious, and there's there's sort of a this notion that anybody who's pro-life is only that we've only arrived to that position because of some sort of religious fervor. And I think that's an amazing reason to be pro-life, just for the record. But also, you do not have to be any one particular religion in order to become a pro-life advocate. Talk to us about the science, because if somebody is willing to just look at the science with an objective perspective, it will lead you to the conclusion that the unborn baby is no different than you or I.

Dr. David Prentiss 3:55

And that's where we start. We want to focus on the science. We want to focus on ethical science and trying to discern the good for the bad, the right for the wrong. I always get a chuckle because I think about at the March for Life. I've passed these folks with the big science that says atheists for life. You know, it's not a matter of having a particular religious fervor about it, but it's looking at the truth, the basic facts. And that basic fact is, as we've known, and scientists have talked about for over a hundred years, a human being's life begins at sperm egg fusion. You don't just have a cell, you have an organism. And so we'd like to focus on what are the scientific facts, because that really gets down to the base that everybody should be able to understand. I've also talked about how human development. This is the most common experience for every human being, if you think about it. And we need to know what goes on in terms of those basic facts and how we can nurture and protect every human life. So we focus on the science. It's not to say that we can or can't be religious in terms of that, but the basic facts are the same, whether you have a religious belief or not. The science and the truth remain the same.

When Human Life Scientifically Begins

Victor Nieves 5:14

The facts are the facts. You know, one of the things that we often present to people when we're making the case for life or defending the unborn within the foundation, I would say, of the pro-life position are certain scientific truth statements. And one of the things that I think is very compelling for most people, and I'd be curious, Dr. Prentice, your thoughts on this. But we highlight the fact that from the moment of fertilization, the unborn baby is alive. And, you know, there's a lot of ways that we could explain this, but just as a layperson, it's growing, it's developing, it's maturing immediately, it's replacing its own cells. In fact, as we've many times heard, about a 96% consensus when you send out these surveys and these questionnaires to biologists. And I want to point out that this is not just a group of Christian biologists. This is not just a group of overtly pro-life biologists. As much as I love the work of our pro-life OBGYNs and stuff, that's not who was responding to this. This went out to thousands and thousands of people. What can you tell us to those who somehow, some way, they look at the facts because we're all dealing with the same reality. We're all dealing with the same evidence. We're all dealing with the same science here. How could somebody look at embryology and come to the conclusion that that that, whatever you want to call it, we know it to be a baby, but that that entity is not alive? I mean, I still hear people tell me that on a daily basis.

Dr. David Prentiss 6:32

Yeah. And it's not a matter of looking at the facts and the science. In those cases where they would essentially deny those basic truths of biology, they have their own particular set of beliefs and and desires, really. So if you look at whether they want to use that young embryo to harvest embryonic stem cells for research, which destroys the young life, whether they want to edit the genome of that young human being and do different experiments or try to come up with a better human being, the perfect baby, and so on. It's a matter of treating that human life, that human being, more as an object, whether it's for experimentation or to try and craft and model that young human life into something that they want. Or, as we've seen with a lot of the abortion advocates, something that they want to reject. Denying that this is a human being, denying that this is a life early on in development, nonetheless, it's still a human life. It's a matter of putting their own desires and wishes ahead of the actual facts and denying that truth.

Victor Nieves 7:41

And it's almost, to me, Dr. Prentice, I mean, this is almost like a pseudo-religion of its own. To deny all of these facts, I really can't come up with an explanation for it other than what you just said. That this is just a total denial of all of the science. I mean, I guess I'll ask it this way: Am I missing something? Are any of us missing something? Is there some sort of a scientific argument based purely on the facts and the observable information? Is there an argument to be made that at the moment of fertilization we do not have a new life?

Dr. David Prentiss 8:09

No, there's not. The biological facts remain the same. And those who focus on just the biological facts all agree and have, as I've mentioned, for over a hundred years. You look in the embryology textbook, and they will validate that same truth. Early stages of life have been categorized, if you will, into what are called the Carnegie stages for the first eight weeks. And this was set in stone, if you will. And the scientist who is responsible for putting all that together, Ronan over Hilly, has made a statement that, you know, prenatal life begins at fertilization and postnatal life begins at birth, but that's the same life. Look at the genome. That genome of that new individual, even at the single cell embryonic stage, is different than mom. This is not just an extension of her body. This is a new individual. The way mammals, including human beings, grow a new individual is by gestation inside a womb. But that doesn't change the nature of the individual involved. It's interesting, in fact, if you the honest scientists, if you ask them, and I can remember a hearing chaired by at that point Senator Brownback, a number of years ago, they had a number of scientists in there, and the topic was embryonic stem cells versus adult stem cells, which are better. Senator Brownback at that point made a very pointed question to a Harvard scientist who was on the panel, very esteemed, and so on. And of course, they were arguing that we should use those young human beings, destroy them for the embryonic stem cells. They said, Doctor, when did your life begin? Not the generic, when does a life begin? When did your life begin? And being an honest scientist, he had to say that fertilization. So, you know, again, this is not a matter of belief in that sort of esoteric sense. This is a matter of what the scientific and biological facts are. Dr.

Why An Embryo Is An Organism

Victor Nieves 10:05

Prentiss, you touched on something very important there. Again, going back kind of to the foundation of the pro-life position, there are three scientific truths that we here at Life Issues Institute, we often point out. The first we mentioned is that from the moment of fertilization, the unborn baby is alive. We also have touched on the fact that it's human. You mentioned the genome. Well, if we look at the DNA, it's not like this is a giraffe in question. It's not like we're debating the ethicacy of dolphin fetuses or something. This is a human being. Every strand of the DNA, and correct me if I'm wrong here, belongs to the species Homo sapiens, no different than the DNA, you know, in my body or in yours. But one of the things that we'll often hear, even with those first two facts established, that it is alive and it is human, we'll hear, oh, well, you know, so is your skin cell, right? If you scratch your arm, you're gonna kill a whole bunch of, you know, human, and it is true, I suppose, to say that those are human cells, that they are alive in their own way. But you mentioned a key distinction there. And that is that the unborn baby is not like a skin cell, it's not like a gamete, it's not a part of another organism. It is a whole organism. It is complete, it's it's self-directed, it is a distinct organism, not the mother, not the father. It doesn't share the exact same DNA. Talk to us about the importance of that piece, that this is a distinct, this is not the mother, this is not the father. And when you put all those pieces together, it's just undeniable to me.

Dr. David Prentiss 11:27

And it's a bedrock part of the science that that term, and that's the term we like to use, it's an organism, even at the one cell or the ten cell stage, or anywhere along that developmental continuum. And it's a continuum as well. Once you start, as you mentioned, there's a developmental trajectory, there's a pathway that this new individual has started on. And it's self-directed because the genome and the instructions also contained within the proteins within that new organism. It's not a fertilized egg, too. I kind of want to hit that one because that's a misnomer that a lot of people like to use. Oh, it's a fertilized egg. It's not really human. It's no longer for an egg. The egg was fertilized at sperm egg fusion, but it is now an organism. It has its own metabolic controls, it has its own developmental controls. And yeah, I've I've heard over the years a lot of times, well, you know, it's a skin cell, that's human being too. It has the same gene. Well, no, it's not. It's not an organism. You can put skin cells into a womb or a womb-like environment till doomsday, and they will not develop into a full human being, an organism. They will continue to grow as skin cells. I taught cell culture for 50 years, and we would grow human cells and animal cells in the dish. And you never had a case where that dish of skin cells, all of a sudden, here's an organism growing inside there. They're arms and legs and a beating heart. It just doesn't happen because those cells are not an organism. Whereas the new human being at Sperm Egg Fusion is an organism and can continue to grow and develop as long as we nurture it and provide that kind of environment for it

The Frozen Embryo Objection Answered

Dr. David Prentiss 13:17

to grow in.

Victor Nieves 13:17

Dr. Prentice, I'm going to spring a question on you here because you address something again, like always, that's so very important. You mentioned the continuum of human life, that we begin at the moment of fertilization, but life looks different as we get older. I often like to point out to people that there are certain things that I, as a, you know, a healthy 26-year-old guy, I can do that a newborn cannot do, just for the record. I can run a mile, you know, a newborn might not be able to run a mile. Or same thing toward the end of our lives. There are certain things that we may not be able to do in the way that we could before. I say that all to address a point that I've heard from many pro abortion advocates, and they'll say, well, at the very beginning, as they would say, you know, the fertilized egg can be frozen, that this new human being can be frozen in cryostorage. And they'll say, Well, a human being can't be frozen. If they froze you, Dr. Prentiss, you would just die. And they'll try and make the case that that means somehow the unborn baby is not also a human. With your understanding of the science and going so much more in depth, you know, in this knowledge than most of us would have. What do you say to somebody who draws that objection and says, well, they can be frozen on day one? Does that mean that they're not a human being?

Dr. David Prentiss 14:24

Not in the least. And it's a matter of freezing them. Number one, does not change the nature of that entity, that organism again. We'll stick with the biology, but that human being. And yeah, you're not going to be able to freeze me or you because we've got around a 10 to 100 trillion cells versus a young embryo that even at a later stage when they still will freeze some of these, might have 10 or 20 or 100 cells. That's simply a matter of biology and physics. And again, we would freeze cells that we had cultured in the lab and then thaw them out later and they would start to grow again. There was a critical aspect of that. You basically have to soak cells or an embryo, an early embryo that you're freezing, in what amounts to a type of antifreeze, different types of chemicals. And the point is you don't want ice crystals to form in the cells of this young human being. Why is that? Well, think about the size. An ice crystal to a two-day-old embryo is going to be like a huge sword appearing within one of its cells. And it will kill those cells and kill that young human being. And so you add a little bit of different types of chemicals have been used. It prevents the ice crystals forming. The individual essentially is put in a suspended animation by putting them into this frozen chamber. And you really have to do it at very, very low temperatures to have the best type of preservation of the individual, liquid nitrogen temperatures and so on. But you're also doing this at a stage where there are very few cells in the individual. And that's why there becomes a better chance that we can thaw that young human being out versus trying to thaw you or me if we're dumped into a liquid nitrogen freezer. It doesn't always work even then because it's not 100% effective at getting that little antifreeze into all of the young person's cells. Used to be you had a 50-50 chance of surviving the thawing. Now it's better, maybe 75%, maybe even 80%, but there's still a chance that didn't work. And it's because those are usually embryos that have more cells than the younger ones. And so it's hard to get the little protectant into them. But you don't change the nature of the organism, whether they're in the dish, whether in the freezer, or whether they're in the womb. Absolutely.

Victor Nieves 16:57

And you know, it goes back to the, again, one of the foundational truths of the pro-life position that you and I, we don't have a right to life based on something that we can do. If we did, we're opening a serious bag of worms. And that is a massive problem that will eventually impact all of us. It's it's not a measuring contest where, you know, I can run faster than you, so I'm plus one human point, or I'm smarter than you, or you're smarter than me. And so you're more of a human being. You have more rights. It's not a sliding scale. That's just, it's an absurd medical ethic. It's an absurd scientific ethic to try and say that some people would be more human based on what they can do, or, you know, based on perhaps I suppose what they cannot do. Dr.

IVF Selection And “Better Baby” Marketing

Victor Nieves 17:38

Prentice, changing gears a little bit here, I'm curious your insight and the work that you do with salt. How are some ways that you see modern scientific enterprises threatening to compromise, destroy either the sanctity of human life, or just humans in general? What concerns do you see on the horizon?

Dr. David Prentiss 17:56

And unfortunately, there are a lot that are cropping up and in the news lately. One is the idea, and I mentioned it before, that people want to make, quotes, better human beings, or help you pick the best embryo. So IVF figures into all of this, and we've spent a lot of time studying that. That could take up a couple of shows of our time. But this is one where they're basically even advertising a few companies now that let us do a bunch of genetic tests on your IVF embryos, and we'll help you pick the best embryo. You know, you want one that's going to be smarter, you want one that might be able to run in the Olympics, you want certain hair color or whatever. Oh, we'll provide that and so on. Despite the fact that the science really isn't there and they can't deliver what they promised. He said they're already advertising this and even advertising the next step. You know, we might be able to do some gene editing on some of your embryos, and we will make them better. We'll add another gene that might make them faster or smarter or so on. Again, the science isn't there. And in fact, in the U.S., SALT folks were responsible for passing legislation a number of years ago that makes that illegal. But they still want to push this and they're again pushing on people's desires. Who wouldn't want to have a smarter baby and help your kid along and so on? We hire tutors and we do all sorts of things with kids and give them piano lessons

Cloning For Spare Parts Ethics

Dr. David Prentiss 19:26

to try and help them become better people. Well, they're looking back at the embryonic stage now to do that. The gene editing aspect also rears an ugly head in the fact that there are people now that want to grow clones, and their cloning is still with us, and newer and in fact more dangerous forms, but also to edit those clones so that they would not have a brain. They would simply be what they have called organ sacs. So we will grow your clone so that then when you need an organ for transplant, we'll just go to the incubator where this non-entity is growing and we'll get the heart or we'll get the liver or whatever organ you might need. This is macabre. I don't know. Words fail in terms of the horror that we're talking about. But let's go back to an underlying principle that's really the existential problem here. The idea that some human beings are better than others or can be made better than others, and that in some cases they might not be human beings. The transhumanists and so on are the ones that want to make these non-entities, they would call them, as organ sex. Every human being is valuable simply because they're a human being. And it relates to that developmental continuum where you start as a single cell and you end up with several trillion. You acquire different abilities along the way. Some are better at some things than others. You lose some abilities as we go on and age further, but it doesn't change our basic nature that we are a human being, a valuable entity. Dr.

Victor Nieves 21:08

Prentice, what you've just described should make the hair stand up on the back of everybody's neck. I mean, this is, I think maybe Orwellian is perhaps the best way to describe this is horrific. It's shocking to think that our fellow human beings could concoct such evil in their head as to say we're gonna clone somebody and we're gonna use, oh my goodness, we're gonna use it as an organ bag. That is absolutely horrific. To the point that you mentioned, however, when it comes to people doing genetic modification in the womb, to say, well, we're gonna make, I don't know, maybe, maybe we want our kid to have blonde hair or something. Maybe maybe it's something benign like that. Or maybe they want to have a performance, what they would consider some sort of a performance upgrade. There will be people who think, what's the harm in that? There'll be people who think, you know, I mean, it's it's maybe, let's say hypothetically, to grab from the plot line, I suppose, of Jurassic Park, let's say we can edit the genome to get around a certain Certain disease, some sort of an ailment, some sort of an illness that a child has in the womb, could we just change their DNA a little bit to maybe give them a long and healthy life? If we were to kind of steel man the other side's position, there may be those who say, well, what's the harm in that part? You know, that we've done a lot of great advancements scientifically. What's the harm in modifying the genetic code of a child in the womb? What do you see as kind of the long-term ramifications? What road are we going down?

Heritable Gene Editing And The China Case

Dr. David Prentiss 22:26

Yeah, there's actually a threat to humanity in general in terms of this remaking human beings in our own image. And, you know, we're not necessarily the best model in terms of being the designer, but this idea that you would do this kind of genetic engineering at the very earliest stages is what's called heritable gene editing or heritable gene engineering, because if you do it that early, whatever modifications you make will be carried on and passed or inherited by future generations. And it sounds noble in some ways to say, oh, we want to prevent this disease from ever happening. We want to forestall any problems, not enhancement, just we're going to prevent the disease. Not treat it, we're going to prevent it from ever happening. Wouldn't that be a great thing? Well, the problem is we don't really know what we're doing when we start fiddling with the genetics of a human being. And the perfect example is an individual in China who a few years ago tried to do exactly what we're talking about. He took a couple of little girls as embryos and tried to do the genetic manipulation. His goal, he said, was to prevent them from ever being infected with the HIV virus. And so he made this change in their genetics while they were embryos and actually gestated them to birth. Nobody supposedly knew he was actually going to do that. He announced it at a big global genetics meeting and was almost uniformly ridiculed for doing it. I think some of the folks there simply were upset that he had tried it before they did. But let's look at the actual effects on the individual and the potential future of humanity. He wasn't actually able with his gene editing to completely prevent them from being infected. His tools were not very well tuned. But also the hubris that, oh, you just have to make a little cut or a change here doesn't affect other parts of the genome. And that is one big problem with this type of gene editing, especially the heritable, that we don't know where else it's making changes. Even in the gene that he supposedly was targeting, yeah, they might have been immune to the HIV virus. But as you started to look at other things that this gene does, he probably made them more susceptible to West Nile virus, to influenza. He probably changed their cognitive abilities and shortened their lifespan. So there are a lot of problems that can come when we have the thought that we know so much and we can do this, and I'm the smart person, I can make it happen. And again, these are heritable changes that are passed on. We have no idea what effects that might have in the future. There is a good side, let me just add, to gene editing if you do it in what's called somatic gene editing. Somatic meaning the body, and we're talking about treating individuals after they're born or even soon before birth, you can do this now. But it's at a point where you're not changing their whole genome and allowing that to be inherited. Instead, you actually are trying to treat a disease. And they've come up with ways now to attack sickle cell anemia. There was a baby born, I think it was about a year and a half ago, they just call him baby KJ. He had a life-threatening genetic problem. He was diagnosed in the womb, and they were able to come up with a directed type of gene editing for him. So as soon as he was born, he was treated. And six months later, you couldn't tell that he ever had any problem. So there's some good uses, but it's individuals.

Somatic Gene Editing And Real Cures

Dr. David Prentiss 26:11

It's not targeted towards changing the whole genome and changing humanity.

Victor Nieves 26:16

It sounds like playing God, you know, and that's never a good strategy. We are not God. We should not. I love the way that you said that. It's as though we're making humans in our image, but that's not our place. God already made us in his image. I think that we would be wise, not again, not to go back to Jurassic Park, but we would we would be wise not to mess with things that are not ours to mess with. You know, Dr. Prentice, as we talk about this, it's just striking. This is real life. I mean, you know, we hear these things, and maybe somebody just tuned in on the radio and they're thinking, well, is this like uh sci-fi stuff? Are they talking about some sort of a hypothetical? Maybe in a thousand years, people would be talking about this. Unfortunately, horrifically, we're talking about this literally right now today. One of the things that's

Sentience Claims And Dehumanization Risks

Victor Nieves 26:57

interesting to me as well, having debated abortion with many people from different worldviews, one of the most common arguments that I have dealt with is people will claim that an unborn baby is not really a human being until they have achieved what they describe as sentience, which we would just summarize is basically subjective experience, the ability to process things around you. Some people define it a little bit different, which makes it fun, but they'll say, until the moment of sentience, it's not a human being. Do with it what you will. And so a very practical question that that ties to our conversation in a very interesting way. A practical question that I've heard people ask is, well, can you harm a non-senti organism? And they'll say no. They have to say no. It's foundational to their position. No, you cannot harm a non-sentient organism. And I've seen people ask the question, because organ harvesting is a big debate. We need, it would be wonderful if we could have an infinite supply of human hearts somehow to heal everybody who has heart problems. People will ask the question, well, what if we could do something to the unborn baby in the womb to prevent it from ever becoming sentient? And what they end up describing is very similar to what you just mentioned, an organ harvesting corpse, basically. Somebody who has no thoughts, they have no mind, they have no brain, they're not sentient. And we would just use them to harvest organs. And I have seen it with my own eyes. I have exchanged with people who have literally told me that they would be okay with doing something to the baby in the womb. I don't know, the science of what you would have to do, severing something at a certain stage of development to ensure that they would never develop a brain, but they would develop, you know, the rest of their body and harvesting their organs like this. This is real life that people are actually supporting. These are positions that are not detached from us by a thousand years. These are not hypotheticals that could never come to fruition. This is the ethic that people are proposing right now today. And it kind of underpins this entire conversation. The horrors are, in my opinion, Dr. Prentice, they are actually beyond what you and I can come up with right now. We could pick our brains and think, man, what are the what-ifs? I don't think we'll ever know all of those what-ifs. And Lord willing, we never will. It's very concerning. It's very, very concerning that this is the state of affairs. What do you see as somebody inside, as somebody with scientific knowledge that far surpasses that of the average person? You're in this scientific community. Are you worried about what you're seeing, or is it really a uniform pushback against this?

Dr. David Prentiss 29:23

I'm worried. My SALT colleagues are worried. And that's again one of the reasons that we form SALT as a group of scientists and policy experts to speak into the culture about this and get the truth about the science and the ethics in there. The instance you mentioned, there's they're basically it, it's very simply, their focus is on the thing that makes you human is having a brain, and not just having a human brain, but one that has a certain level of sentience or intelligence. Another way to phrase it was there was a uh a philosopher at Princeton who said, you know, well, you ought to just not name the baby for at least six months or so after they're born because you might not want to keep them. And we wouldn't consider them to be a human being because, you know, basically he was talking about intelligence and sentience, but he also focused it down to the ability to feel pain. He said, you shouldn't really count them as a human being until they can resent being killed. Well, that's ludicrous. Come on. You're focusing on one particular attribute and one particular organ of a human being. You know, we have anencephalic infants that are born because of a developmental problem. They really don't form the full human brain. You have adults who have had a stroke at pretty much any time during our lifespan, not just older individuals, but even younger individuals can have a stroke and can lose consciousness. What about your mom who has Alzheimer's disease? Well, she's not really sentient anymore. Let's just harvest her organs. All of these various things just totally ignore the fact, the biological fact, that this is a human being, an organism, and we owe them respect. We owe them that human dignity. And to try and pick apart and say, well, I think this is what makes us human, or this is what makes us human, or this is what makes us human. You know, and again, it's not even just having a human genome, as we discussed. It's a matter of being a human organism. At any stage along that developmental continuum, we need to come together as human beings and value and protect every life, especially those most vulnerable, and not start to come up with different tiers and categories where you say, well, you don't count as much, so we're going to use your organs, or yeah, you count more. We'll we'll give you more pay or whatever. You know, if it's a matter of size, hey, Shaquille O'Neal is near the top of the leaderboard there in terms of his humanity. But he would also say, I'm just a human being, just like this person here, and so on. Again, the focus has to be on our commonality, and that is being a human organism, to use that biological phrase.

Victor Nieves 32:15

You know, Dr. Prentiss, this has been tried, what you just described. It has been done many times throughout human history, where individuals will sit on some sort of a bizarre high horse, and they will look down and cast judgment on other human beings, and they'll say, Well, you know, you might be a human, but you're not really a human. You're not really like me. This has justified some of the worst atrocities we've ever seen in the history of the world, whether it would be chattel slavery, whether it would be exterminating people in literal genocides. It's always an interesting thing. They have to do this. It's a prerequisite to dehumanize. They'll say, Well, you're not really like me. What an audacious thing to say. That, you know, you're not really worthy of being a human being. That's a terrifying path to walk. And I would advise everyone to stay very far away from it.

What Non Scientists Can Do Now

Victor Nieves 33:02

Dr. Prentiss, what are some things that lay people can do? Those of us who are not scientists, who are not embryologists, what can we do to, for one, help your work, you know, those of you who are kind of at the tip of the spear whenever it comes to this scientific ethic, but you know, what can we do in forms of policy, I suppose? What can we do just to educate our friends and family members? What advice do you have?

Dr. David Prentiss 33:24

Well, again, the public are our primary audience. And it's a matter of you should educate yourself in terms of these issues. And we try and phrase things in a way that everybody can understand. And if you can't understand it, ask lots of questions and have us explain it better than we did. But you know, go to our website, send questions to us if you're interested. Hey, I read this story about something. Can you explain it to us? We're small and we're just kind of tongue-in-cheek, say, at an embryonic stage of our organization's development. But we want to help people understand these issues and empower them then to speak into the culture. And that might be just talking with your family, talking with folks at church or at school. Call up or write an email to your elected representatives at the federal and the state level because they're dealing with these issues and they need to hear from you. And, you know, keep at it. Don't be discouraged at the news where now some billionaire is saying, yeah, we ought to make these organ sacks and we'll have every organ we need to. Now, point out the things that are falsehoods. Point out the things that are not science-based. And focus hearts and minds and intelligence on those things that are actually going to advance the human condition. Well, Dr. Prentice, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you.

Final Takeaways And Resources

Victor Nieves 34:56

Well, in speaking with Dr. Prentice, I mean, there were multiple times today where the hair literally stands up on the back of your neck as you hear these things. Therewellian horrors that could be in store if we violate the sanctity of human life. And that's what this really all goes back to. No matter what we do, no matter what scientific, you know, embryonic advancements that we think that we may be able to come up with in the future, we always have to filter everything that we do to make sure that it is in alignment with the sanctity of human life. And the facts of the case are that, yes, at the very moment of fertilization, you have a new human being, deserving of the right to life and all other protections that we would give to any human being. They're not something to be played with and tested on and altered and mutilated in the name of science. That would be a horrific scientific ethic that I encourage everyone to stay very, very far away from. If you'd like to learn more about the things we've talked about here today, I encourage you to go to our website, lifeissues.org. You'll find more information and resources from Dr. Prentice so that you can share that with your friends, your family members, and your coworkers as we defend life. Again, that's available at lifeissues.org. Be sure to tune in next week for another straight talk on life issues.