We can care about life when nature doesn’t

This isn’t exactly breaking news, so there’s no hurry in reporting it, but I want to tell you the fate of the universe.

Since the Big Bang theory became common knowledge, we’ve known that we live in an expanding universe, but until relatively recently the ultimate “end” was still a debate between the open, closed and flat models.

My hope has been for a closed universe; I’ve always liked the symmetry of a universe that expands, then collapses, in an eternal cycle – world without end, amen.

The prospect of new life in a fresh universe has always been a comfortable thought to revisit, if only infrequently, but a different fate awaits.

The last star won’t twinkle out for about 100 trillion years, so we’ve got time to get used to the idea that we most likely live in a flat universe. Both flat and open universes expand forever, but the flat slows down, eventually approaching – but never reaching – zero.

It’s going to get cold out there, and the prospects for sustained life don’t look good.

Having had a brief look at infinite expansion and the interstellar desert that will be the ultimate death of life, let’s focus our lens now in the other direction: the microscopic realm where life begins. That’s a misnomer, of course, since life began once (or perhaps in multiple instances), a few billion years ago and has simply been passed along ever since.

Many folks believe that life “begins” at conception, and if you can show me a dead sperm fertilizing a dead egg, I’ll buy in. However, for convenience, I’ll use sperm and egg as the starting point – if not for life, then new units of it, be they people, pandas or polar bears.

When it comes to people, each sperm and egg represents half a human, so to speak, and they are clearly valuable little critters. But how valuable? Nature is prodigiously wasteful of them, especially sperm cells.

The equivalent of America’s population can head toward the egg on each try, so a single studly guy could, potentially, overpopulate the solar system.

Eggs don’t fare much better. A female fetus starts out with millions of oocytes (egg cells) that are greatly reduced by birth, and further culled, to thousands, by sexual maturity. Since an average woman produces about 400 fertilizable eggs in her lifetime, even with four children, 99 percent of her eggs are “wasted.”

So I think a good question might be: Where and when do we begin valuing these cells, and how much value do we assign them at any given time?

The traditional Catholic Church view, as stated by Pope Innocent III early in the 13th century, was that life begins at “quickening” – when a fetus starts moving in the womb – a policy that held until 1869.

Clearly, there have been other points of view, subject to changing knowledge and beliefs.

Curiously, people who are resoundingly against science – e.g., creationists – use it for all it’s worth to try to deny women the right to reproductive freedom, pushing for earlier and earlier legal protection of the fetus. The National Right to Life Committee says, “A new individual human being begins at fertilization, when the sperm and ovum meet to form a single cell.”

That’s fine to consider. But nature, once again, doesn’t care.

About half of all pregnancies terminate early, but as only 15 percent or so are known miscarriages, about a third are lost before they’re ever found. Sperm and egg, conjoined, are still very much at risk, especially in the early stages.

So what value do we assign the zygote? The blastocyst? The embryo?

Again, nature destroys about a third of these before they even reach a knowable size. A potential human being, yes, but something smaller than the head of a needle is not just a very tiny person.

I’ll say, tongue in cheek, that this potentiality, should it become an actual person, will enjoy a good meal, be it mother’s milk or a sizzling steak. But stem cells are far from having mouths, much less the capacity to enjoy what goes into them.

So let’s back slowly away from the insanity of letting the potential of adult stem cells go untapped. The universe is too large for such small minds – or hearts.

At our current level of scientific progress these cells have become nature’s/evolution’s gift to us. (Substitute “God” where I’ve used “nature,” if you like, and reread this.) Letting unused, unneeded, intended-for-the-trash cells languish when so much good can come from them makes no sense.

Let’s engage in the government-funded research that finally gives them the full value – and respect – that they deserve.

Nature says these cells have little intrinsic worth; she tosses them willy-nilly. We can accord them their worth by granting them the blessing of enhancing the life of real people with real afflictions.