A modest proposal.

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) is considering a proposal to beget human lab animals, provided they are destroyed before they reach a certain age. Fourteen days is the age they have selected. They call these very young objects of research pre-implantation embryos. The term is unfamiliar. Over the years the NIH has labored to find appropriate words to designate humans that they would like to study, so to speak, beyond the ordinary limits. Now they have come up with "pre-implantation embryos."

Justice Harry Blackmun, in Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton (1973), had to cite many legal sources and medical documents; they referred to the child. When Blackmun spoke for the Supreme Court, he carefully avoided any such reference. Instead he spoke of the embyro, or the fetus, or the unborn. When references obliged him to refer to the unborn person, however, he placed that word at

arm's length by using quotation marks - "person."

Person, after all, was the constitutional status that had been claimed by so many groups to end their treatment as inferior categories of human being: slaves, free blacks, the landless, women, Indians. "No Person shall be deprived...." Since the Court in 1973 was removing from the unborn all protection of law, it needed to remove all protection of sentiment as well. This was so radical an innovation that Blackmun understandably but heedlessly referred to the mother throughout the decision.

No one is perfect. Most journals and newspapers discipline their usage with style sheets. Most news media imposed "fetus" years ago as the only permissible reference to the newly disposable unborn, and woman as its bearer. Of course, the rule always breaks down in the articles on prenatal care, because you can't coach pregnant mothers into talking about their fetuses. They always use the B-word.

A few years after Roe and Doe, scientists wanted access to these younglings slated for abortion, especially if they could be kept alive for a while after the abortion in order to be used for research. As long as they could use Blackmun's all-purpose fetus word all would be well, for since 1973, one could do whatever one wished with a fetus. What was wanted was to get those little bodies out of the womb alive and work on them in the lab, and so a federal commission began talking about a fetus ex utero: a fetus outside the womb. Even folks who never read Dorland's Illustrated Medical Dictionary knew that this was weird. A fetus who emerges living from the womb is instantly a baby.

The current NIH Human Embryo Research Panel uses several other turns of phrase to legitimize an unrestricted period in the earliest days of life when a human being is disposable. Fetus won't work anymore, so they speak of the fertilized ovum. That sounds so small and undeveloped as to be insignificant. But an ovum, as the panelists and their educated readers know, is an ovum only until the moment it is fertilized. After that it is a human being in the zygote stage of his or her embryonic life. The concept of a fertilized ovum is as conflicted as a convex basketball.

The NIH panel also speaks of the pre-embryo. But the only thing pre- an embryo has is a sperm or an egg. And those are not what the scientists want to get their hands on. This is all word-play intended to render the youngest humans morally negligible and politically expendable.

The fact is that the NIH wants to pay scientists to breed human beings for use as laboratory animals. They are aware of some public reluctance to allow humans to be begotten alongside rodents and fruit-flies, used for research, and then, as they say in the lab, "sacrificed." Mind you, the NIH is not careless about laboratory animals. The laws and regulations governing their care run to a thousand pages, and their housing costs about four times as much per square foot as decent faculty offices. Still, the human hamster is going to be difficult to sell politically.

In its report, the panel acknowledges that the very young embryo merits moral respect as a developing form of human life. But a cancer is a developing form of human life and merits no respect at all. What commands our respect and protection is not human life, but living human beings.

In a bold stroke, the panel finally turns from word-craft to embrace an eccentric theory devised by its theologian member. No human being, we are told, qualifies for moral recognition and social protection as a person just by being a human being. To accredit humans as persons, we who award that status have to calculate, not simply who or what they are, but how much of a burden they are going to be, and whether our best interests are served by declaring them protectable. With this "theology" no more bioethicspeak will be needed. We balance the fact that they - these human beings - are really too little to know or to feel what we are doing to them, against the important genetic discoveries they might make possible for us. At this point the calculus becomes easy: on balance we have moral respect for them, but more moral respect for what we can gain from them.

Of course, this is not entirely innovative. It comes down to the same us deciding what the same they is worth - to us. The syphilitic blacks at Tuskegee; the lethally irradiated soldiers at Ground Zero; the retarded children injected with hepatitis at Willowbrook; the Filipino convicts infected with the plague by U.S. doctors; they were all unfortunately they, and the prevailing moral calculus didn't award them enough moral respect.

The precise issue to be decided this December at the NIH, of course, is not whether making human hamsters is moral or legal. The NIH is equally incompetent in both those disciplines. They will decide whether to fund such research. And they will probably say yes.

But I offer a modest proposal.

This panel report will not abate the widespread distrust in what the NIH, in its conflict of interest, calls moral inquiry. I propose that in order to sidestep even the suspicion of exploitation, all scientists funded to beget and use embryonic human beings for research voluntarily agree to use only embryos whom they themselves have sired or conceived, in vivo or in vitro, with their mate as co-parent - all of this done, it is understood, with moral respect, profound respect, but not undue respect. To mistrustful public, to an embarrassed NIH, even to their other children, these truth-seeking researchers can then take deserved pride in the fact that they will not have asked of others what they themselves were not ready to give.