Appendix G. 
251 
is not captured when moral emphasis is merely about individual 
rights and personal autonomy. 
Or consider another shared sensibility that emerges if we move 
away from questions of embryo status, namely a wariness about the 
human tendency to hubris and overreaching. Zoloth put this point 
eloquently in relation to the biblical story of the Tower of Babel. She 
notes a rabbinic midrash on this text: “when a worker was killed, no 
one wept, but when a brick fell, all wept." Zoloth comments on this 
midrash as follows: 
It was this decentering of the human and reification 
of the thing that was the catastrophe that felled the 
enterprise ... It is not just that they breached a limit 
between what is appropriate to create and what is 
not, the process of the creation must be Ccurefully 
mediated, with deep respect for persons over the 
temptations of the enterprise. Such a text elaborates 
on the tension between repairing the world . . . and 
acts that claim that the world is ours to control 
utterly (Zoloth, 2001, 106-107). 
Beyond Questions of Embryo Status 
This passage from Zoloth helps to illustrate the point I wish to 
make in arguing that the stem cell debate has been too focused on 
questions of embryo status and that we must move beyond status 
questions if we are fully to do justice to the moral questions raised by 
technological developments associated with stem cell work. For 
concern about human efforts utterly to control the world is not a 
moral worry narrowly tied to status questions. 
Let me put this point in the form of a question that has not 
typically been asked in the stem cell debate: Is adult stem cell work 
as improblematic as it is often assumed to be? That this is a 
productive question is suggested by testimony of Francis Collins 
before the President’s Council on Bioethics in December 2002. 
Collins was asked to speak about the topic, “genetic enhancements: 
current and future prospects” and he specifically addressed the issue 
of pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (PGD). Although PGD is 
usually understood to involve screening IVF embryos and discarding 
unwanted ones, it is also possible to screen gametes. Because 
gamete screening may not have broad utility, Collins did not discuss 
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