Appendix G. 
Report on the Ethics of Stem Cell Research 
PAUL LAURTTZEN, PH.D. 
Director, Program in Applied Ethics, Professor, Department of 
Religious Studies, John Carroll University, University Heights, Ohio 
. . . the final stage is come when man by eugenics, by 
prenatal conditioning, and by an education and 
propaganda based on perfect applied psychology, 
has obtained full control over himself. Human nature 
will be the last part of nature to surrender to man. 
(LevNhs, 1947) 
This sudden shift from a belief in Nurture, in the form 
of social conditioning, to Nature, in the form of 
genetics and brain physiology is the great 
intellectual event, to borrow Nietzsche's term, of the 
late twentieth century. (Wolfe, 2001) 
I begin with passages from an unlikely pair of authors because 
although C. S. Lewis and Tom Wolfe are somewhat distant in time, 
certainly different in temperament, and extravagantly different in 
personal style, they share an imaginative capacity to envision the 
possible consequences of modem technology. The technology that 
occasioned Lewis’s reflections, “the aeroplane, the wireless, and the 
contraceptive" may now seem quaint, but his warning about turning 
humans into artifacts, that accompanied the passage quoted above, 
is eerily prescient. Similarly, although he does not directly take up 
stem cell research, Tom Wolfe's reflections on brain imaging 
technology, neuropharmacology, and genomics are worth noting in 
relation to the future of stem cell research. In his inimitable way, 
Wolfe summarizes his view of the implications of this technology in 
the title of the essay from which the above passage comes. "Sorry," 
he says, "but your soul just died." 
The point of beginning with Lewis and Wolfe, then, is not that I 
share their dire predictions about the fate to which they believe 
technology propels us; instead, I begin with these writers because 
they invite us to take an expansive view of technology. I believe that 
such a perspective is needed and is in fact emerging in recent work 
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