Ask a Bible college Student

[Mister Agenda]

If you consider genetic structure the only essential marker for what's human (rather than awareness, viability, a functioning brain, etc.), what do you make of HeLa cells? Is a HeLa cell a human being?

Genetic structure is the only thing that makes sense for us to declare the species of an entity. Being in a comma doesn't make someone unhuman. Needing some sort of life line to survive doesn't make someone unhuman. And there are plenty of people who don't have a fully functioning brain and some babies are born with no brain at all. They survive for a few minutes and then die. It's not like they were not human lol. 

As far as I am aware, a hela cell is a person's cancer cell. It's a different cell type, and it has the DNA makeup of the person it came from. Not its own unique set of human DNA.

So it's okay to kill identical twins because their DNA isn't unique? Or one of them, at least?

Fun fact: when someone is brain dead, it's legal to let them die even if the rest of their body if functioning fine. There's a difference between being in a coma and lacking one of the qualities most of the rest of us consider essential to be considered a living human being.

And you seem to be conflating 'human' and 'human being' in a convenient way. My cheek scrapings are human, genetically speaking.