How Is a Catholic Supposed to Think About the COVID Vaccine?
The Dutch molecular biologist Alex van der Eb had been studying viruses and vaccines for nearly two decades when, in 1973, he was met with what he took to be an exhilarating opportunity. Three years into their studies, van der Eb and his research partner Frank L. Graham had succeeded in isolating the genes in adenovirus 5 responsible for turning mammalian cells into tumor cells, and they were curious as to whether the effect, which they had demonstrated in rat cells, could be replicated in human cells.
For that, they needed human cells. Like many laboratories, van der Eb’s used donated human remains expressly released for medical research. On this particular day in 1973, those human remains happened to belong to a girl aborted legally at 18 weeks by an anonymous woman at a teaching hospital in Leiden, the Netherlands. That woman had consented to the use of the body for scientific purposes.
“I can clearly recall the day, now almost 50 years ago, that I had to perform that procedure,” van der Eb recently wrote to me in an email. “As I felt very responsible and
