The human embryo, subject of research
Gonzalo Herranz. group de Trabajo de Bioética, Universidad de Navarra.
Lecture at the Centro Culturale Don Minzoni, Cagliari.
Delivered on 11 March 1988.
1. A topic of singular significance
2. What do people say the human embryo is?
3. What is research on human embryos?
4. Legislation in preparation and the pre-embryo trap
Respectful research or destructive research?
I must dedicate my first words to thank the C.C. Don Minzoni and its President, Dr. Mariano Murtas, for the kind invitation to participate in the programme "Responsabilità della persona, libertà delle scienze", with a discussion on research on embryonic human beings. It is the first time I visit the island of Sardinia and this adds to my gratitude.
1. A topic of singular significance 
The topic on which we are going to reflect today is a very important topic , of the first magnitude. If we were to understand its significance, I think we would ask the Heads of Government to postpone their other pending negotiations and put on their diary the urgent issue of the ethical status of the human embryo. For determining what the rights of embryos are and what ethical demands they make of us should be at the forefront of society's concerns.
I know that this statement of mine may seem exaggerated. I would insist, however, that there are not many problems more urgent than the one we are dealing with this afternoon. A great Italian jurist and thinker, my friend Prof. Luigi Lombardi Vallauri, has expressed this brilliantly. In the prologue to a conference on the ethical relevance of the human embryo, he made these considerations: "You might think that we are meeting here in the world for a fashionable problem, for an irrilevant problem. In fact the problem is quantitatively minuscule (cells, embryos), politically minuscule (human beings without voice, without vote, without contractual force), economically minuscule.... Eppure il problema è contemplativamente cruciale perché attiene da vicinissimo all'autocomprensensione dell'uomo... se il pottere dell'uomo, di fronte all'embrione, non facesse una sosta, un arresto, ma passasse oltre senz'altro e invadese quel minuscolo territorio come invade tutto il resto della realtà, sarebbe varcata una linea di non ritorno...".
These statements by Lombardi are very timely and are a wake-up call for scientists. They need to discover that there are very sharp moral reasons that compel them to reflect deeply on the ethical status of the human embryo. Scientists and doctors need to do this before they burn their boats and set out to conquer this tiny but exciting and promising territory. Some are driven to cross this line of no return by an uncontainable desire to know, to unravel the mysterious molecular and cellular mechanisms of man's development . Others are driven by a desire to know, to unravel the mysterious molecular and cellular mechanisms of man. And others are driven by a strong and vocational commitment to expand the beneficial capacity of science. For both of them, these motives are noble and generous aspirations, which we should all applaud. Therefore, they do not understand how anyone can oppose on ethical grounds the expansion of science and its applications to alleviate infertility. They sincerely believe that the respect due to embryonic human individuals must yield to the interests of science or society.
But to them we must object that we cannot be obscured by the glitter of these immediate gains, because many important things depend on our attitude towards human embryos, things that concern us most intimately. To a certain extent, our attitude towards other human beings stems from our behaviour towards the embryonic human being: respect for our fellow human beings is rooted in the respect we show for the human embryo, that bewildering creature which condenses in a minimum body volume the highest concentration of humanity.
2. What do people say the human embryo is?
When scientists and ordinary people are asked what they think about the ontological and ethical nature of the embryo, i.e. what the human embryo is or who the human embryo is, what moral demands it makes of us, a very varied and contradictory range of answers is obtained. Most respond with the familiar opinion poll phrase: "Don't know, don't answer". But the curious thing is that among those who answer "Don't know" there is no shortage of scientists, and even more so, experts in clinical embryology.
This specific ignorance is a recent phenomenon. Because until the advent of FIVET, everyone considered the embryo of any species as an (embryonic) being of that same species. Any book on human embryology could begin as follows: "The development of a human individual begins with fertilisation, a phenomenon by virtue of which two highly specialised cells, the spermatozoon of the male and the oocyte of the female, unite and give rise to a new organism, the zygote".
This statement is no longer held in many circles. It seems as if the demystification of human fertilisation, the direct visual observation of this always astonishing phenomenon, produces opposite effects among observers. For some, it brings a lasting smile of amazement as they contemplate the indescribable and mysterious simplicity with which a new man is begotten. To others it causes a kind of incredulous disillusionment, as if they do not accept such a humble genesis for man, and say that the zygote is something irrelevant, a molecular product devoid of human value, a moment empty of meaning.
To adequately summarise the answers to this central question, what men say the human embryo is, I will limit myself to showing two prototypical and highly significant positions. One is that of the report of the Study Committee on Human Fertilisation and Embryology, report Warnock, which many regard as a masterpiece of secularist ethics. The other is the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith's Instruction on Respect for Nascent Human Life and the Dignity of Procreation, the document that sets out the Christian view - respect and dignity - of the embryo and its genesis.
There is no hiding the decisive influence that the Warnock Committee's report has had on the way many people think about assisted human reproduction techniques and the human embryo. But it is necessary to stress that, as far as we are concerned, the main contribution of report Warnock has been to throw a smoke bomb on the question of the ethical and biological status of the embryo. The majority of the Committee members, in order to ethically neutralise the human embryo and to devoid our relations with it of moral significance, chose to deprive the human embryo of ontological consistency and turned it into a functional notion. The Committee wrote: "Although the questions of when life and personhood begin to appear are susceptible to clear-cut answers, we hold that the answers to such questions are in fact complex amalgams of factual and moral judgments. Therefore, rather than attempting to answer these questions directly, we have moved straight to the question of how it is right to treat the human embryo".
The Warnock Committee cannot be faulted enough for its decision to bypass the first and germinal question of defining the ontological nature of the embryo, on which all others depend. But over and above this omission, the Committee did something very evil; it declared that any attempt to elucidate the ontological nature of the embryo is an intellectually inelegant business , for it is a muddle of facts and moral (pre)judgements that resists rational analysis.
The report Warnock also set the historic precedent of reducing a difficult ethical problem to a regulatory issue management assistant. The regulation proposal by Warnock confers on a supervisory body the prerogative to authorise research on human embryos from any source, provided that, among others, two conditions are met: that the research does not extend beyond day 14 after fertilisation and that no embryo that has been tested can be transferred into a woman's uterus.
It is clear that this overturning of the ethical evaluation of the embryo could only be achieved at the cost of silencing very important ontological and ethical objections. The report Warnock had strong support for a programmed manipulation of public opinion. Mrs. Warnock, with the financial aid of her many sympathisers, well versed in deterrent dialectic resources, promoted a campaign, elegant in form but ruthless in substance, to disqualify those who see the human embryo as a being worthy of the utmost respect. The report says that the objection to using human embryos in research is a fundamental objection, based on moral principles: as is well known, ours is an age that has little sympathy for fundamentalist attitudes. He adds report that many of those who oppose research work on human embryos do so because they feel an instinctive opposition to anyone venturing to tinker with the creation of human life, which amounts to a veiled accusation of irrationality and obscurantism. Mary Warnock argues that there is no place in ethics today for absolutes.
In contrast to the Warnockian doctrine of utilitarian domination over the young embryo, which amounts to a pact between the powerful to exploit the weakest, the Vatican Instruction Donum vitae imposes respect as an ethical attitude towards nascent human life. I have great personal sympathy for the Instruction, because I am deeply sympathetic to the idea of ethical respect. And I like it because its formulations are simple. In the Christian vision, all human beings are to be loved equally, all respected as human persons, from the first moment of their existence. To all we owe the same care, the same protection from the moment of conception. Wherever it happens - in places as morally disparate as inside or outside of marriage, in the violating injustice of rape, or in the aseptic conditions of the tube at essay- conception always inaugurates a human life, not of the father or the mother, but of a human being who develops on his or her own and who would never become human if he or she were not already human. All human beings demand the same attention and respect from us. If they are sick, we must treat them according to the best and most beneficial advances in biomedical science, that is, diagnose them and apply appropriate therapies, always with respect for their personal uniqueness. Prenatal diagnosis and therapeutic interventions on human embryos are lawful if they respect their life and integrity, if they seek their healing and well-being and if, as with other human beings, they do not expose them to disproportionate risks.
The language of the Instruction is simple, made of respect and compassion, but open to scientific audacity and modernity. It does not plunge the embryo into a stratum of sub-humanity. On the contrary, it confers on it full rights and makes it share all the ethical requirements conferred on human beings. The human embryo is not considered as an experimental animal or a cellular complex, but shares the general privileges of humanity.
I will not tire of insisting that, in the midst of the exuberant proliferation of guidelines and recommendations on human embryo experimentation, only Donum vitae is the most open-minded. It opts for the ethical emancipation of the embryo and invests it with inalienable human rights.
From a deontological point of view, no one has shown greater fidelity to the guidelines of the magna carta of human experimentation than the Declaration of Helsinki of the World Medical Association. The Vatican Instruction endorses the idea that the interests of science or society can never prevail over those of the individual; it states that research cannot become a destructive manipulation of human beings; it advocates that a human being can never be included in an experimental essay without consent; and it mandates that experimenters must fail their research if it results in harm or discomfort to the experimental subjects.
I am sure that these ideas will eventually prevail. I was delighted to see the stark differences between the 1985 and 1987 versions of the World Medical Association's project Declaration on In Vitro Fertilisation and Embryo Transplantation. The document discussed in Brussels in 1985 included the familiar and inhumane rules forcing the suspension of experiments after 14 days and prohibiting the transfer to the uterus of an embryo that had been subjected to experimentation; and it included as suitable areas for experimentation not only the clinical processes of assisted reproduction, but also the development of techniques for genetic screening or new modes of contraception. I fought tenaciously in Brussels, together with many esteemed colleagues, to improve this document. It did not seem at the time to have achieved much. But the document presented in Madrid in 1987 is free of all these ethical aberrations and clearly states that the Helsinki rules apply not only to the mother, but also to the embryo.
As we can see, the human embryo is today, like man himself, a sign of contradiction, and the battle for respect for man is still undecided.
It is high time we asked ourselves, what is actually happening? Is embryo research only being talked about, or is it actually being done? And on what?
3. What is research on human embryos?
To answer this question, we must go to Library Services and examine the specialised scientific journals in which clinical embryology papers are published. What are the quantitative dimensions of the problem: are human embryos sacrificed by the thousands or by the hundreds, one by one or en masse? Are there many and very urgent technical problems to be solved that necessarily require the use of human embryos? What is the scientific quality of the published papers? How do they comply with the ethical standards in force?
The field is new and too little time has yet elapsed to make a sound judgement on the subject. So far, there has not been much experimental work on human embryos. An anecdote reveals this. When Enoch Powell MP introduced a bill in the British Parliament project to ban experimentation on human embryos, the journal Nature, whose belligerent line publishing house in favour of such experimentation is notorious, launched a competition awarding a free annual subscription to the journal to any scientist who submitted a research topic that necessarily required the use of human embryos. Nature never spoke about it again: presumably, if it had received any responses from respectable scientists, it would have rushed to publish them.
Not much research is being done. In the UK about 20 research protocols have been C until last November, when the Voluntary Authority of licence was replaced by the Statutory Authority then created by the English Government. In the Federal Republic of Germany, only four research applications had been C by the end of 1986. The situation in the USA is very peculiar: since 1980 there has been a ban on federal funding of research on human embryos by the Presidential Commission on Ethical Issues in Medicine and Biomedical and Behavioural Research. In Australia the situation is confusing, after the Canberra government did not accept the valuable report of the Tate Commission, which condemned destructive research. Local difficulties have apparently induced some researchers to emigrate in search of better climes.
The published works do not yet seem to have reached a satisfactory level of maturity and quality. Their subject matter is not very varied. One can count on the fingers of one hand the works aiming at curing defects detected in abnormal human embryos, such as the attempted microsurgical enucleation of an extra pronucleus in polyspermic human embryos. It is widely accepted that embryos with severe genetic imbalances can be used to study embryo metabolism or for morphological analysis. The most frequent studies are those aimed at improving the conditions under which clinical IVFET techniques are performed: these are studies on the "quality" of embryos in relation to ovarian stimulation techniques or on the influence of changes in the composition of fertilisation and culture media. But these studies, leaving aside the good intentions of the researchers, take an intolerable toll on human lives: determining that there is no appreciable difference between the Australian cryopreservation technique of Mohr, which uses dimethyl sulfoxide, and the French technique of Testart, which uses propanediol, required the creation and destruction of 183 human embryos. A study on the comparative efficiency of three different techniques (postcoital test, hamster oocyte fertilisation and human oocyte fertilisation) for the diagnosis of the fertilising capacity of a sperm sample led to the programmed destruction of more than eighty human embryos. The conclusions were very anodyne and the inevitable feeling arose that we are faced with a waste of human embryonic life.
But it is not only the cost of embryonic human life that causes deep discomfort when reviewing the articles in the new Embryology. There is also a sense of rushed work, preceded by little reflection, seeking technical innovations to secure some supremacy over competing groups in improving clinical outcomes.
It is not surprising, therefore, that many papers are weak. The scientific quality in this area of medical science is considerably lower than that required in other fields. Here is a text that defines very well the atmosphere of tolerant indifference with which the Committees of Editors allow infringements of the scientific method to be perpetrated. "Although the groups were not randomly designed and show significant differences in terms of the various factors analysed, the data obtained in 43 cases are added for comparison". But, despite the caveat, the two groups are compared statistically, the corresponding P's are obtained. And presupposing the goodwill and innocence of the readers, the authors, in the discussion, elevate what started out as an illicit data traffic to definitive conclusions.
There is no disguising it: the literature on assisted reproductive techniques is heavily contaminated by articles of dubious scientific quality. There are undoubtedly published works that are correct and even elegant from the point of view of scientific methodology. But there are many more that seem to be hastily produced and do not stand up to serious criticism of their methodological and statistical procedures. Voices are beginning to be raised from within the scientific community itself calling for quality and a more rigorous selection of papers accepted for publication.
But, unfortunately, they all show the same insensitivity of authors towards the moral claims of the human embryo: it seems as if the young embryo is considered by all as an experimental animal.
And this is happening in front of a society that is not only tolerant, but admiring. It does not appear that the legislation being prepared will curb abusive research.
4. Legislation in preparation and the pre-embryo trap
There are calls everywhere for legislators to establish rules to regulate the new field of human reproductive technology. Parliamentary debates will soon begin. That is why I think it might be interesting to look at the Spanish scene for a moment, as there are politicians in my country who are very keen to pave the way for new legislation.
At the moment, a Commission of the Spanish Parliament's congress deputies is discussing a Proposition of Law on Assisted Human Reproduction. It is a comically open-minded legislative project in terms of social and family policy. As far as embryo research is concerned, it is informed to the marrow of the bones by the Warnockian mentality.
The legislative project invokes in its favour, to make its approval easier, the reason that, for the most part, the rules it proposes to regulate research in human embryology are taken from prestigious international documents: from report Warnock, first of all, but also from Resolution 1046 of the Parliamentary Assembly of committee of Europe, from the Ethical Considerations on New Reproductive Technologies of the Ethics Committee of the American Fertility Society, etc. It even makes a tactful reference to the Instruction Donum vitae, to include it among those who accept the notion of "pre-embryo".
This referential manipulation is not surprising, as the selective citation of ethical "authorities" is a common phenomenon in the preparatory documents of all partisan legislation. The fact that the authors of these documents are individuals with a direct interest, for political or technical reasons, in the practice of such an enquiry, and who therefore have a flawed view of the matter, is hidden from the public. They act as judge and jury. Today, by virtue of their specific skill , experts are able to impose their particular points of view, a circumstance that needs to be seriously criticised, if only in parenthesis, because we have gone too far in our admiration for experts. After all, the judges who judge thieves are not usually experts in the practice of robbery and kidnapping. Possessing special expertise in something can paralyse or atrophy common sense. The expert may be extraordinarily proficient at knowledge how a particular thing can be done, but curiously often unable to decide whether it is morally desirable or undesirable. The expert may even be blind to such moral judgements. This is demonstrated by the notion of the pre-embryo.
A large part of the preamble of the Spanish draft law is devoted to justifying the need for the notion of this concept. The pre-embryo is its cornerstone, as it is the cornerstone of the whole argument in favour of unrestricted experimentation on young embryos.
I cannot trace here the history of this term, coined by Dr. Penelope Leach, but I must allude to the ideological background of the neologism. In a Lancet article publishing house we are told that the term "embryo" in the context of IVF research is misleading and that instead the less emotionally charged term pre-embryo should be used for the product of conception in its first 14 days, as only part of that product is destined to become an embryo. The term pre-embryo, the Lancet makes clear, has done more than anything else to lower the temperature of discussions around embryo research.
Indeed, to speak of pre-embryos is a semantic trick to expropriate the embryo not only of its human condition, but also of its biological entity. Thanks to this verbal artifice, the human embryo is reified and ontologically annulled, and opposition to destructive research is annihilated. I would recommend everyone to read the Symposium "Human Embryo Research. Yes or No?" published by the Ciba Foundation, to see how in the light of day, in the course of the discussions, criticisms of the scientific legitimacy of this term are literally crushed. At one point in the discussion, this dialogue is recorded:
Clothier: It would be interesting to know what you think of the... expression pre-embryo.
Maddox: I think it's a cosmetic trick.
There follows a brief but confusing discussion in which different points of view are expressed on the ambiguity with which scientists and the public use the term embryo, on the questionable acceptability of the term pre-embryo, on the sufficiency of the vocabulary of common Embryology to designate the different phases of the development. Following this, the moderator, Clothier, concludes:
We all think that "pre-embryo" clears up the problems.
The term pre-embryo serves to banish the early embryo from the human family, robbing it of all human privileges and rights, including specifically the protective ethical standards that apply in research and experimentation to other human beings. Moreover, because they are essentially vulnerable and incapable of giving informed consent, they should, in any case, be subject to particularly qualified legal and ethical protection of the kind that applies to other particularly vulnerable human beings.
We doctors realise that the term pre-embryo is not born out of scientific and medical needs, but out of ideological interests. I therefore have the impression that it will have a very short lifespan in medicine and biology. I base myself on indications such as the following: Nature magazine, which was the main centre for spreading the word, in an article publishing house last May, in which it reproached the British government for its legislative laziness in subject on assisted reproduction, said: "Another urgent task must be to ban the word 'pre-embryo', used... as a synonym for a human egg fertilised but not yet implanted in the uterus. Put simply, the word is a cover, a way of pretending that public disagreement about IVF and other innovations in human embryology can be eliminated by the use of appropriate nomenclature". Prof. O'Rahilly, Director of the Carnegie Embryology Laboratories, one of the world's most eminent centres for Primate Embryology, appended that request in these terms: "The suggestion to ban the unnecessary word 'pre-embryo' is most timely... the term embryo designates 'human progeny in the first eight weeks' (Concise Oxford Dictionary).... Terms we have rejected for the human embryo include ovum (incorrectly used for everything from the unfertilised oocyte to the three-week-old embryo), 'egg' (which would be better reserve for a nutritious object that often appears on the breakfast table) and others... all of which are inappropriate". Erwin Chargaff, has pointed out that "pre-embryo is an entirely unjustified designation. I fear that it merely serves the function of an alibi".
A Warnockian corollary of the pre-embryo concept is the prohibition of continuing research on in vitro embryos for more than 14 days, when the existence of the in vitro pre-embryo is declared terminated. It must be destroyed, as a research embryo can never be replaced in a woman's uterus.
The Spanish law proposal also enshrines what I usually call the "myth of the fourteen days", a notion that seems to have fascinated many cultivators of modern clinical embryology. But no one has been able to justify the following shameful clauses in which the 14-day doctrine is concretised:
a) during the first fourteen days of its existence, the human embryo in vitro is not a human being;
b) as an object of biomedical research, the human embryo ceases to be, from that day on, an entity of the slightest scientific interest; the experimenter is legally obliged to destroy it and must renounce knowing the medium or long-term consequences of his therapeutic interventions or the precision of his diagnostic methods.
c) whoever wishes to carry out research on human embryos has a moral duty to prevent these "potential" human beings from actually becoming human beings and is obliged to put them to death.
All these decisions are, whatever the philosophical or religious convictions of researcher, extraordinarily serious decisions, which would have to be based on biological reasons of indisputable solidity. But there are none. Those that have been given to fix the fictitious border of 14 days are arbitrary, lacking all contact with the observable reality of the embryonic development . Until the hypothetical radical change attributed to the embryonic age of fourteen days is clearly demonstrated with serious biological data and reasons, so that it can be accepted by any honest scientist, it cannot serve as a legitimate limit to radically inhumane ways of treating certain human beings. It is not a wise solution either ontologically or from the point of view of freedom of research.
The conclusion is clear. The 14-day rule is irrational and capricious. For either destructive research on embryonic human beings is intrinsically immoral and should be banned, or it is a laudable operation, so that limiting it to fourteen days is an obscurantist decision that opposes scientific progress and freedom of research.
Respectful research or destructive research?
Finally, we must ask ourselves about the future. In my opinion, the notion of the pre-embryo will have a fleeting existence. It cannot be used as a basis for moral conduct, because it is not only a semantic trick, but also a manipulation of consciences.
A law that would establish that human embryos constitute an inferior biological and ontological caste, which can be treated in a qualitatively different way from the other members of the human race, is an unjust law. It is elementary distributive justice (suum cuique) to respect the in vitro embryo's right to live, because its own is its life; and because it is a human being, it must be recognised as deserving the same treatment as other human beings, no more and no less. In the medical field, its health and life must be respected and, if it is ill, it must be diagnosed and cured, like other sick people, but its deliberate destruction can never be medically justified.
The Vatican Instruction outlines ethical guidelines that have righteousness and consistency in their favour. It tells us that medical research cannot cause harm to living embryos nor can it harm the mother; that any research intervention on embryos can only be done after having obtained the free and informed consent of the parents; that living embryos, whether viable or not, must be respected with the same respect that is due to other human beings; that, given the exceptional fragility of the young human embryo, any experimentation that is not directly therapeutic is illicit; that any experimentation that is not directly therapeutic is illicit; that any experimentation that is not directly therapeutic is illicit; that any experimentation that is not directly therapeutic is illicit; that, given the exceptional fragility of the young human embryo, any experimentation that is not directly therapeutic is illicit; that there is a reasonable margin of audacity in the essay of new remedies, if the risks involved are proportionate to the danger of death in which the embryo is placed.
Research on human embryos concerns us all. We have all been embryos, just as we have all been children. If it is not killed or does not die, a human embryo becomes a man or a woman. An embryo is not a thing: it is a human being of embryonic age. It is not yet a child or an adult, but it exists in the common human form in which we have all existed.
When someone uses a human embryo for destructive experimentation, they cannot avoid the fact that they are sacrificing a human being, albeit an embryo, in order to obtain information that is of interest to them. The interest may arise, I admit, from a most noble and altruistic desire to solve a problem that disturbs the happiness of many marriages or to obtain scientific information of the greatest interest. When one puts one's desire for research before one's duty to respect the human life of embryos, one has to ethically justify one's conduct, and to do so one can choose one of two paths.
a) To declare that a human embryo is simply a cell mass, a molecular complex. So are we. But we know that the in vitro embryo is not a simple cell culture, but a complete organism, that it is already human from the beginning, that it has connaturally as much human dignity as the other members of the human family. Human dignity belongs to everyone, it does not depend on the place of residency program. It is possessed by the fact that I am a human being, not because it is bestowed on me by the guardians of society. If for some accidental reason I can be denied the degree scroll of being human something serious is happening, for it seems that we are back to a society of masters and slaves, no longer a family of free men.
b) To declare that obtaining certain scientific data is worth the sacrifice of a number - tens, hundreds - of embryonic human beings. Whoever thinks this way classifies himself as a rational utilitarian, because he measures the ethical tone of his action by the benefit obtained: having a certain subject of information is better than not having it, whatever the cost in human lives. This is the mindset of doctors who use human beings in disrespectful experimentation or destructive experimentation.
Some years ago, in 1976, a symposium was held at the Hastings Center in New York on whether it was ethical to bring the atrocities of Nazi researchers into the controversy over the ethics of human research. The Institute's Director , secularist Daniel Callahan, acknowledges that there can be a malicious way to apply the Nazi analogy and that it is very often used wrongly or maliciously. But there are also times when it is appropriate: when one wants to point out that it all "started from very small beginnings". Between sacrificing human embryos to clarify and remedy sterility disorders and sacrificing prisoners to clarify the pathophysiological mechanism of death by immersion in cold water to try to save the lives of fighter pilots shot down in the cold waters of the North Sea, there are notable differences, but there are even deeper analogies. I have the same compassion for both, for embryos and prisoners, the same dignity. As a doctor, I am obliged not to discriminate between the human beings with whom I enter into professional relations. I cannot wish for others what I would not wish for myself. And I am certain that the death of an embryo is the death of a man.
Destructive research on human beings may be "the very small beginning of a new medicine of iniquity". That is why I think that governments should put on their diary an intensive information campaign about the human embryo. That would be information about ourselves, when we were at that decisive age and writing the most brilliant chapter of our biological biography, when we had the fabulous and fleeting ability to make the most momentous decisions about ourselves.
Thank you very much for your amazing patience. And thanks to those who have taken care of the translation.