From the House, a disgrace.

THE House has voted--with the support of 50 Republicans--to subsidize stem-cell research that destroys human embryos. The bill now moves to the Senate. President Bush has vowed to veto it if it reaches his desk. On the merits, it shouldn't get that far.

The search for cures for diseases, or information that might someday lead to them, is obviously a worthy endeavor. But research, like all fields of human activity, should follow ethical rules. Making taxpayers finance research that kills human beings falls on the wrong side of the line.

Sen. Arlen Specter, the liberal Republican from Pennsylvania, argues that the research is ethically permissible, and worthy of subsidy, because "there are some 400,000 of these frozen embryos, which were created for in vitro fertilization, which are going to be thrown away" if not used for medical research--so why not derive some advantage from their demise?

That argument appeals to people's practical streaks, but it rests on a bit of sleight of hand. It is a way of assuming that human embryos are not human beings with rights without actually trying to establish that point. Anyone who takes seriously the idea that human beings in the embryonic stage of development have rights would find Specter's language jarringly inapposite. Nobody complains that death-row inmates and nursing-home residents are being "thrown away" since their organs are not being taken from them before their inevitable deaths. Specter's argument is also factually wrong, since the vast majority of embryos are not going to be "discarded anyway," but rather indefinitely frozen (often at their parents' request and expense)--a problematic situation, but not the same as death.

Specter also proposes an absurd standard to decide the question of when human life begins, saying, "This potential for life on these embryonic stem cells cannot begin to occur unless it's implanted back in a woman." Suppose scientists developed an artificial womb, capable of carrying a fetus to term. Would the resulting children lack the "potential for life" because they had never been "implanted back in a woman"? By Specter's standard, the answer is yes, and we would be free to harvest their organs. The debate over stem-cell research will set the stage for coming battles on cloning; and, given recent breakthroughs in cloning technology in South Korea, we should be careful about defining the "potential for life" as carelessly as Specter has done.

Those who favor embryonic-stem-cell research argue that America would lose its scientific and economic "edge" if the federal government did not subsidize this research. Our best researchers would move to other lands with more generous subsidies. An additional increment to GDP is not, however, worth making the government complicit in injustice. The competitiveness argument is also incompatible with the claim that by not subsidizing the research, we are throwing away possible cures for diseases. If those cures are found in other countries, then it stands to reason that Americans will have access to them.

President Bush, four years ago, said that the federal government would fund research on stem-cell lines that had already been taken from human embryos. But he also said that he would not encourage the taking of human life by funding research involving the destruction of human embryos after that time. Bush's critics say that this funding is inadequate, even though hundreds of shipments of stem-cell lines have gone out to researchers. The critics say that these lines are "contaminated" because they were developed with mouse feeder cells and therefore cannot be used in clinical trials on humans. This is incorrect (although Reuters reported it as fact). Mouse feeder cells have been involved in the development of FDA-approved drugs and devices for humans before. Besides, several lines developed without mouse feeder cells are eligible for funding under Bush's policy.

But even if the critics were correct about these points, it would not establish that the policy should be expanded. The killing of human beings, in the embryonic or any other stage of development, should not be an acceptable research practice. It should be prohibited, not subsidized.