Commenting on the recent authorization by the British authorities of research on human embryos, Bishop Gebhard Fürst of Stuttgart observed that “man has become a thing that is unscrupulously subjected to scientific research and may be manipulated”. “We are consigning human beings into the hands of other human beings”, said the bishop, who is also a member of the German national Ethical Council. He also warned of the tendency to “degrade human life to a material that can be used and disposed of at will”. “The danger he continued does not consist in the scientific research itself but in the fact that limits of any kind are no longer accepted. Those who think they can dispose of everything, also have no qualms about producing human embryos or cloning them for purposes of research, and rejecting by pre-implant diognosis human beings in the embryonal stage who don’t match up to their conception of what the perfect life should be”. Endorsing the position of the Jewish philosopher Hans Jonas, Bishop Fürst called for the restoration of the category of the sacred in ethics. “Only it he declared can rein back the extreme forces at our disposal. In the era of science we have forgotten that life is something sacred”, said Fürst referring to the biblical and philosophical tradition.
