The Stem Cell Debate: Ethical Questions
By benhilo
@benhilo (871)
Tripoli, Libya
March 15, 2009 3:29pm CST
The story for the year 1997 was the cloning controversy, the public debate over cloning human beings. Ian Wilmut, the laboratory midwife to the world famous sheep, Dolly, never intended to clone a human being. He still opposes the idea. Almost everyone opposes the idea."The Roslin Institute and PPL Therapeutics have made it clear that they regard the idea [of human reproductive cloning] as ethically unacceptable." Ian Wilmut and Donald Bruce, "Dolly Mixture,"...Yet, the cultural explosion ignited by this new scientific achievement continues to spread fallout. The prospect of gaining too much control--too much choice--over our own evolutionary future elicits anxiety, fear, suspicion. Genetic science seems to be igniting fires previously smoldering in our primordial sensibilities. Science is secular. And when secular science enters our DNA we fear it is entering a realm of the sacred. We fear a Promethean blunder. We fear that our own human hubris will violate something sacred in our nature; and we fear that nature will retaliate with disaster. To protect ourselves from a possible Promethean blunder by science, we are tempted to stop further research with the commandment: "thou shalt not play God!" What is your position on the Stem Cell debate?
2 responses
@MysticTomatoes (1053)
• United States
2 Apr 09
For a while, it seemed that Bush's policies would spell the end of the stem cell research as he banned it while he was in office. One of the first things 0bama did was to reverse the ruling, and allow stem cell research to continue. The 8 years that Bush had outlawed research set the medical community back probably 50 years. During the time it was outlawed, how many diseases could have been cured or better treatments found because of stem cells? How many people waiting in line for a new organ would have gotten that new organ thanks to stem cells? How many lives would have been saved?
We will never know.
Religious people argue that using stem cells means deriving them from embryonic means. It meant that there would be an ethical debate on where life begins vs abortion. In their eyes, this was no less than a crime similar to abortion. Bush did not want to go back on his vow that he would not fund research and then banned it. He believed that if he banned the federal funding, many po life people might swallow their misgivings about the use of stem cells that were derived from discared embryos. The embryos that were discared were on the destroy list that were in labs and storage facilities that housed them. The numbers of embryos ranged from a hundred to a million. Accurate numbers aren't know. An embryo only has a certain life period before it's no longer viable. The new legislation Bush proposed only applied to those, but he caught flack from pro-lifers and backed down.
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