human embryos as caviar: the dignity of the human person?

From Thomas Berg's review in First Things of Gilbert Meilaender's book, Neither Beast nor God: The Dignity of the Human Person...

A wonderful opening anecdote/illustration/question from a dialogue on an ethics committee:

I asked my colleagues whether there is anything the committee would agree should never be done with human embryos. One colleague conceded he would not want them served in an upscale restaurant as a kind of caviar; another, that she would not want them used for cleaning floors or for powering cars. As to the prospect of using them to develop cures for disease, however, none of my colleagues would object.

As futile as such discussions might seem to those of us attempting to uphold the sanctity of human life in the arena of public policy, they are not entirely fruitless. That discussion in particular forced everyone in the room to confront unwieldy questions: When should “respect” for incipient human life begin? In what degree and to what extremes? And just what is it about the human embryo that demands any respect at all?...

Giving structure to the entire work is Meilaender’s insistence on a twofold manner of speaking about dignity...."human dignity" and "personal dignity".

Human dignity, he explains, “has to do with the powers and the limits characteristic of our species—a species marked by the integrated functioning of body and spirit.” Personal dignity, by contrast, “has to do not with species-specific powers and limits, but with the individual person, whose dignity calls for our respect whatever his or her powers or limits may be.”...

On this interpretation, when a man lives like a beast, betraying his rationality, he loses the dignity of virtue; he does not, however, relinquish the dignity of his nature....