Research on stem cells is advancing knowledge about how an organism develops from a single cell and how healthy cells replace damaged cells in adult organisms. Stem cells are one of the most fascinating areas of biology today. But like many expanding fields of scientific inquiry, research on stem cells raises many ethical questions as rapidly as it generates new discoveries. For example embryonic stem cell can be collected and later grown into any needed cell in the body. The Coalition of Americans for Research Ethics says "The destruction of human embryonic life is unnecessary for medical progress, as alternative methods of obtaining human stem cells and of repairing and regenerating human tissue exist and continue to be developed." It is these people that feel that a few-day old embryo is a human person, and by extracting its stem cells kills the embryo, an act that they consider to be murder.
A colony of embryonic stem cells, from the H9 cell...
English: Embryonic Stem Cells. (A) shows hESCs. (B...
Mouse embryonic stem cells. More lab photosStem cells offer people hope by promising to greatly extend the number of patients who could benefit from transplants and much needed therapies to treat debilitating diseases such as diabetes but there is much religious opposition to these treatments. So, why would anyone object to research in this area? The problem is simply that a particular type of stem cell, which potentially could provide many cell types for a wide range of therapeutic uses, is obtained from the very early embryo. To make matters even more contentious, the same cloning technology that created Dolly the sheep could in theory be used to tailor stem cells to create a clone of another person. This possiblity is highly defended by the religious right which just happen to represented by a large number of republican in congress. I am not pushing cloning human but I am willing to let science advance which...