stem cells and frankenstein

Stem cells are in the news again and as usual there is much confusion around this issue. Why do I say this? First of all many may not already realize that embryonic stem cell research is not against the law. Anyone or any group can raise as much private capital as they are able in order to invest in this type of research. The question at hand is whether should the government fund this research? Why? Most people on the street are not fully informed on this issue. After all, what is a zygote or an embryo or even a fetus? In a society where most people are unable to locate the Mississippi River on a map let alone spell it these scientific words are strange like a foreign language. Sure its okay to kill an embryo to get stem cells, by the way....what's an embryo?

Well, an embryo is a human being in the earliest stages of development in the womb. Just as we use the terms baby, infant, toddler, child, adolescent or adult to describe stages of human development out of the womb so the terms zygote, blastula, embryo and fetus likewise simply describe the various stages of human development while in the womb. However since most people have never had biology 101 these terms seem strange and distant and almost non-human.

We can relate to babies, they are cute and cuddly but an embryo!!! Ooh that sounds kinda of gross! We are familiar with babies, we are not familiar with embryos. However we were all embryos once just like we once were all babies. Who knows if we could commonly see embryo's just as we do babies we might just think they are really cute as well. Embyros live in a hidden world called the womb and we don't see them so it is hard to personalize an embryo. Thus it is easy to dehumanize this mysterious population and brush them off as some type of blob of cells or something.

This is an emotional subject with proponents claiming that we can cure spinal cord injuries or Parkinson's disease if only we could get these embryonic stem cells! We are shown heart tugging stories and images of people afflicted with these terrible diseases and then called uncompassionate if we don't support the cause. Listen, we would never dream of killing a baby (a very young human out of the womb) in order to harvest a kidney for an adult afflicted with renal disease why would we kill an embryo (a very young human still in the womb) in order to harvest cells to do research on? Think about it, this really sounds very macabre and Frankensteinian. Instead of sewing dead body parts together from cadavers in an effort to create a human being we are simply taking the live body parts from these very young humans in order to conduct our own fantastic experiments.

Here is another question to think about, where are these embryo's coming from? Are women gladly donating them? Or do people get paid to donate sperm and eggs so the human embryos can be created in a test tube only to then be destroyed as their stem cells are harvested? This is freaky and sounds like a chapter out of Coma or The Island?

Recently there has been breaking research related to the same subject. Yes, it is too early to know the promise of it but three different groups of scientists independently were able to create stem cell equivalents using skin cells from mice and injecting certain genes into them. It is too early to know if this technique can be successful with humans but obviously the ethical ramifications of this possibility are great. So let us hope and heartily support this line of research and others like it. Let us not rush into this issue with blinders on running on pure emotion and not understanding the terminology but let us consider carefully what is at stake and ask ourselves how far are we willing to go? How far should we go?