The fictitious embryo

Gonzalo Herranz, departmentde Humanitiesand Medical Ethics, University of Navarra
Intervention in "The human embryo, is it a person?", 2nd roundtableof colloquium"Family and Life".
Pamplona 15 November 2014

Greetings and thanks.

I am very grateful that a colloquiumon Family and Life dedicates a roundtableto the embryo. The human embryo is first and foremost a child: it is in the embryo that each new individual life begins to develop, and without the embryo the family would not grow. We all know, moreover, how much these two realities, family and life, are suffering in today's society. And we cannot forget that a very important part of this suffering comes from contempt for the human embryo.

My intervention is entitled "The Fictitious Embryo", degree scroll, which is the title of a book I published last year. The coincidence is intentional: the organisers want me to talk about it. I will try to say a few things.

Some people have asked me, why do you call the embryo fictitious?

The basic reason is this: because certain biological concepts and dataon which "mainstream" bioethics has been built about the human embryo of a few days old are fictitious. I recognise that this is an outrageous, outrageous statement. It goes against the common opinion, which holds these concepts and dataas a solid and monolithic block of official doctrine accepted by all. And many deduce from it that the human embryo is, in the first two weeks of its life, a preliminary entity, a mere outline, lacking the minimum biological and ontological level proper to those who possess human dignity and demand due respect from others.

In The Fictitious Embryo I set out to show that the biological ideas that have served to strip the early human embryo of "ethical status" are fanciful, they do not stand up to serious criticism. They are ideas that do not refer to real human embryos, but to hypothetical, imagined, fictitious embryos.

These notions, which I declare to be unfounded, can be found in recent and not so recent editions of books on general biology, embryology, Genetics, obstetrics. I am sure that many biologists and bioethicists will suspect, in the face of my dissent in the face of such homogeneous unanimity, that something is wrong with my head. I pray to God that this suspicion will not prevent them from subjecting the dataand the reasons on which I base my thesis to a merciless and objective critique, so that they can conclude whether they are well-founded and to be taken seriously.

To get to the heart of the problem, it is useful to briefly review its history.

A bit of history

When modern contraception was introduced more than 50 years ago (in its two main forms: hormonal preparations and the intrauterine device), it became clear that a real but unquantified part of its effectiveness was due to its abortifacient action. The intensity of the abortifacient effect of the different hormonal contraceptives is still unknown today. In the case of dius, it is accepted that the anti-inflammatory effect is the main mechanism of their efficacy.

When, years later, in vitro fertilisation was introduced, it became clear that many embryos were lost, including all the "supernumerary" embryos.

That modern contraception and modern assisted reproductive techniques destroy human embryos a few days old was, a few decades ago, a serious moral problem, something that repulsed many people (and not only Catholics). Some denied that contraceptives caused the death of embryos, but this became untenable when the cards were put on the table. Today, it is plainly recognised that the anti-implantation effect is more or less present in the mechanism of action of contraceptives: moreover, the WHO openly funds programmes to develop anti-implantation and anti-gestation agents: it is easier to take one pill a month than one almost every day. But in those early years, this effect was taboo because, by definition, contraception had nothing to do with abortion.

By the mid-1960s, the promoters of contraception devised a clever manipulation of language and redefined the meaning of a few words core topic: conception, pregnancy, fertilised egg, and embryo. They decreed that conception is not fertilisation, but the implantation of the embryo; that, therefore, gestation does not begin at fertilisation, but only 14 days later, after implantation has already taken place; that one can only speak of abortion after nidation has been completed; that causing the death of the unimplanted fertilised egg is not abortion: it is something so insignificant that in the new nomenclature it needs no name.

The new language was tenaciously supported by many public and professional institutions. We find it in the reports of scientific societies, in the vocabulary of official bulletins, in the bureaucratic languageof the WHO, in the declarations of the WMA, and in the guidelines of FIGO, ACOG, SEGO. Some dictionaries have incorporated it. But, curiously, it has not entered the lexicon that doctors tend to use in their ordinary work.

Arguments are born and spread

To give respectability to the new way of saying things, reasons had to be invented: these are what have been called "arguments against the dignity of the embryo", which seek to justify the destruction of young human embryos as innocent. Scientists presented these arguments with great energy and conviction. And philosophers, theologians, jurists and parliamentarians believed them. When they said "identical twins or tetragametic chimeras can be formed up to 14 days after fertilisation", they all replied: Amen.

Thanks to the publications of prominent biologists, physicians and theologians, both Catholic (André Hellegers, Clifford Grobstein, Bernhard Häring) and non-Catholic (Paul Ramsey, Anne MacLaren, Peter Singer), in 1970 the arguments triumphed in bioethics. At first there was, of course, much discussion, but this died down once national legislation and the social internshipdeclared that internshipcontraception was a public virtue and assisted reproductive techniques a blessing. The arguments became a matter of fact, part of accepted scientific and bioethical knowledge. Only the Catholic Magisterium opposed them.

I am a believer. And, at the same time, I consider myself a critical and sincere scientist. I do not accept that there are two truths, religious and scientific, that contradict each other. That is why I decided to critically re-examine the issue. And I set to work. Some people told me that it was too late, that my effort would be useless, like beating a dead horse. I think they were wrong.

The main arguments

Many arguments have been proposed against the embryo: Pascal Ide, for example, has identified fourteen. In my book The Fictitious Embryo, I have limited myself to discussing the six which, in my opinion, are the most important: that of the biological and ethical irrelevance of fertilisation; that of the two cell populations of the young embryo; that of monozygotic twinning; that of tetragametic chimeras; that of the totipotentiality of blastomeres; and, finally, that of the massive loss of embryos in the first days of the development.

It is not possible in the time availableto refer to all of them. A pity, because I find them all interesting. I will focus on the one that, according to general opinion, is the strongest, the one that most appeals to the eye: that of monozygotic twins. We have all seen identical twins and we are all curious to know how they are formed.

The monozygotic twinning argument

It is now well established that monozygotic twins originate from the division of a single embryo into two and that this division takes place during the two weeks following fertilisation. It is also stated that the day on which the division takes place leaves an indelible mark on the Structureswhich we call foetal sacs or envelopes: the chorion and the amnion. If the division occurs in the first 4 days, each embryo generates its own membranes, resulting in a dichorionic and diamniotic gestation. If division occurs between days 5 and 8, with the chorion already formed, the resulting gestation is monochorionic and diamniotic. If the division is delayed to days 9 to 12, the resulting gestation is monochorionic and monoamniotic. If it occurs later, the division is usually incomplete, resulting in conjoined or Siamese twins.

For more than half a century, this has been in all the books. It is what teachers explain on class, what students have to answer in exams. But what is really important are the ethical consequences of this chronology of twinning: it is categorically stated that as long as an embryo can divide in two, it cannot be fully human. No fully human individual can become two. Never does one human body split into two human bodies. Never does the human soul that animates one body split into two souls to animate two bodies. Proponents of the argument challenge immediate animation theorists to explain what happens to the soul when one embryo becomes two.

There is no doubt about it: thus expressed, the argument is very strong. Theologians and philosophers who follow the theory of immediate animation, animation from conception, and who, like everyone else, accept the official chronology of monozygotic twinning, have developed ingenious and sophisticated ontological and theological reasoning to defend their position. But ontology and theology do not usually make much of an impression on hard biologists.

Like everyone else, I too took the official chronology for granted, until the day I decided to examine it critically. I then asked myself: has anyone ever seen things happen as they say they did, where are the works with these observations published? These are questions that no one asks, but which are born of a healthy critical attitude, of the right to scrutinise and evaluate the scientific data.

Finding answers to these questions was not easy. It required hundreds of hours of research and critical reading of more than a hundred years of the bibliographyon twinning. In the end, things became clearer and I was able to conclude that the accepted chronology is not based on observed facts, but on very reasonable but imagined assumptions. It was proposed in 1922 by George Corner, a young American embryologist. At the end of a workin which he describes his findings on three pairs of twin pig embryos, he indulges in a brief exercise of the imagination, in which he suggests that human monochorionic twins could be of two types: one, diamniotic, which would correspond to the subjectpiglet, and the other, monoamniotic, which would correspond to the subjectarmadillo. The first would be formed before, when the amnion has not yet formed; the second, after, when the amnion has already formed. This is the germ of the official chronology. It was born as an exercise of imagination and grew with new additions imagined by Hertig and von Verschuer. In 1955, Corner, by then enjoying immense scientific authority, resubmitted his old theory, now more complete and detailed. He sincerely pointed out that it was a theory, a outlinedrawn with pencil and paper to explain imaginatively how two embryos can be produced from an original embryo. Within a few years Corner's modelwas universally accepted. Repeated thousands of times, it has become the solid factual foundation of monozygotic twinning.

I still find it curious that no one has subjected modelto a strong critique. But when one does, one finds in it so many weak points, weaknesses that they are untenable. And the same goes for the other arguments: to see for yourself, you will have to read The Fictitious Embryo. History of a biological myth.

It is usual that when an author refutes one theory, he or she is irresistibly tempted to propose another, to take its place and promote new debates. Indeed, I came up with a new theory, in which I postulate that twinning could occur within the process of fertilisation.

If there were a failure in the molecular mechanisms that execute the zygote-blastomere transition, we would have that the first zygote division produces two cells that do not progress to blastomeres, but retain zygote status: the initial zygote produces, in the course of fertilisation, two new zygotes, which are two monozygotic twins. And I postulate that the different types of chorionicity of monozygotic twin pregnancies would depend on the fusion of the trophectoderm and that amnionicity would depend on the proximity/distance between the embryos. The significance of my theory is that monozygotic twins would form in the course of fertilisation, not in the time after fertilisation. The new theory is compatible with the theological position of immediate animation. There would then be no need for the winding ontological arguments that try to obviate the official chronology.

Perhaps some of you are curious to know how these ideas have been received. The truth is that, so far, they don't seem to have succeeded. I sent a articlepublished in the journal Zygote to more than three hundred people researching embryology and assisted reproduction. Silence has, however, been the dominant response.

Two leading embryologists published, without warning me beforehand, very virulent, though marginal, and I would say somewhat improvised, criticisms against my theory (not against the critical history of Corner's model, whose value they have acknowledged). It is obvious that my theory has not left them indifferent. Richard Gardner, the number one in European embryology, discovered what my articlecould mean as a danger to the status quo. He entitled his commentary, published in Reproductive Biomedicine Online: "The timing of monozygotic twinning: a pro-life challenge to accepted scientific knowledge". And, curiously, he assigned three words to it core topic: human embryo, monozygotic twins, Vatican. The latter, as well as the pro-life degree scroll, seek to discredit my work. My reply to Gardner, censored and reduced to a quarter, with a few humorous details removed, appeared very late. Hans-Werner Denker, a leading German embryologist, who does research on embryonic stem cells, published a more moderate critical commentary in Zygote. But my response has not been published, despite my protests. Unfortunately, editors of scientific journals are, like many other mortals, victims of their ideological prejudices. Freedom of expression in the scientific press is by no means guaranteed.

I would like someone (and hopefully soon, so that I can see it) to verify the theory I propose on the genesis of monozygotic twins. That would be the declaration in ruins of the main argument against the embryo. And if my theory is disproved, I am left with one consolation: "Every refutation," Popper has said, "should be seen as a great success: not simply a success of the scientist who disproves the theory, but also of the scientist who created the disproved theory and thus suggested, at first written request, albeit indirectly, the disproving experiment".

There will always be that consolation. We will have to wait and see.

Thank you very much.