Stem cell research could save lives, but brings up ethical questions. Should it be more tightly regulated?
56% (152 votes)
Yes. (Add a comment and tell us why.)
44% (118 votes)
No. (Why?)
Total votes: 270
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Adult stem cell research is important. I think it is a sad state of afairs when we do research on embryos , however.
it should be more tightly regulated because it is dealing with genetic material and genetic information. these two things can be put to poor use if they are not tightly regulated. we saw this in south korea. BUT does this mean that it should not be funded? of course not. Stem cell research is an innovative tool and is a moral field of study. By the way, there seems to be a positive correlation between legal abortion and a lower crime rate and a healthier country.
I think that adult stem cells provide many other options to stem cell research, without having to use embryos and raise serious (and valid) ethical concerns. More energy should be put into exploring the possibilities with adult stem cells, which have showed great potential, and yet are often overlooked because of the popularity of stem cells from embryos.
go stem cell research! yahhh!!!!
I think the current regulations are too restrictive and are hampering the pace of research. This will lead to delays in the discovery of cures for disease and treatments for injuries.
I do not want to see research held back due to gray ethical issues.
hey there. i think that stem cell research is totally wicked. i think that the regulations are too bossy, and without them they won't getgood research.
There is no scientific evidence that proves stem cell research is useful, or cures disease. life is part of God's devine creation and not to be messed with. how can taking innocent lives justify post poning the enevitable. I know that you have most likely made up your mind but can you answer my question?
I completly agree. you can't just go out and kill innocent people on the streets can you? no! There Gods creations And they deserve to live.Same with babys! I just can't belive that they can do that! How do you know one of those baby won't completly chane the world! I just cant belive it!\r\n
Embryos are not people, they're just cells, therefore it's not the same as killing some random person on the street.
Also abortion is legal in the US, it's really no different, just using the cells for research that can save lives.
I couldn't disagree more. Abortion is a legal in the United States and has been for years. Trying to compare killing people on the street and opting for a legal medical procedure is outrageous and it's sad to think people are still so confused about both stem cells and abortion. If scientists are permitted to use embryos from medical abortion, isn't it considered recycling? Abortions are happening anyway, why can't we make the most of the situation? Pro Life? How is using these vital cells that were created by God to heal and improve life for millions of people not Pro Life?
Stem cell research does not involve abortion.
It does, right now, require the destruction of some human embryos, but these are typically embryos that a) were created for fertility treatment and will be disposed of, anyway; and b) have only been developing for a few days.
You really need to work on your spelling, shelly & Molly. "Enevitable" is actually spelled "inevitable". Sheesh! I'm only in 6th grade and I know that! And actually, there is a lot of scientific evidence that stem cell research is useful. If you were going to die in two months from an incurable disease, like my friend's grandpa, and you could be saved by stem cells taken from a frozen embryo that would probably be thrown away anyway, it seems very unfair that you would die because some influential person had "moral issues" with stem cell research.
you are an idiot, go ahead and say that to a six year old that was born with AIDS.
it doesnt take away innocent lives. when there is no further use for cells at an abortion or fertility clinic, they just throw them away. now i ask you, why shouldn't we use these cells for amazing scientific research instead of just throwing them away?
i agree with this statement. scientific advancements should not be limited due to someone's personal ethical reasonings. without stem cell research, much of the knowledge we have obtained recently would not have fomented...
i am doing a school debate and i am for stem cells could u guys help me with some personal opinions so i can do a survey\r\n
I agree, the benefits of stem cell research are difficult to reach if they continue to be restricted.
If it can save life to us amercians i think that it should be more looked into. Having taken some health classes in school i think that it is something that needs to be done
Double Sided Argument
There are too many people in this world anyways, so I don't understand why we hold on to people who are in coma's for months on end, and to criminals if they are in jail for more than 2 months, it costs money and takes up space. I think that if the stem cell research is used on people who have injuries that could cost their lives that it should be used but not for smaller surgeries. I think that the government should not restict this research so much but should keep some of the necessary safety and privacy procedures.
no
noooo
always
Yikes, I think that's what Hitler thought.
Wendy,
Oshkosh
i heart stem cell research
It ought to be, but not in such a way as to impede progress, there is a huge difference between a blanket/blinkered "no" and a more creative yet controlled manner in which to move forward.
The debate is currently asinine and un-informed, sadly typical of mainsteam US media "debate" post 911.
I think that stem cell research has amazing promise for curing disease - I also belive, however, that stem cells can be obtained from sources that do not cause harm to others. Women have babies every day - those cells could be harvested for research. legal abortions are performed in the US daily as well - those cells could be used for research, instead of being thrown away - I know that is a sore subject for most people, but I think that a life should not be wasted, and at least using the cells would make the loss of a life that would have been taken anyway serve a purpose for the greater good of humanity.
we agree with you\r\n
That is like saying "I'm going to kill your grandma, but her heart is still good, so can I have it?" When will we see the value in human life? You argue the point in circles. "We are going to kill babies anyhow, so let's get some good out of our bad choice by harvesting stem cells." How does this make any sense?? When does one life lessen in value to save another? What if it was your brother, mother, uncle, son or daughter? Do you only assign value based on ability? That is not very far off of what Hitler thought. Be careful that history does not repeat itself. Killing the elderly, the young, and the disabled will not cure anything.
Well, some people propose that we get stem cells from the "left-over" embryos at fertility clinics. (The creators of those embryos would have the option of donating them to research, and would have to explicitly give their permission.)
Fertility clinics deliberately create more embryos than they can implant. So there are always some left over. Normally, these embryos are discarded.
The embryos we're talking about here are about 5 days old. They're made up only of a hundred cells. And they will never be people, stem cell research or no.
For me, that's nothing like killing someone's grandma, or killing a baby. Unless someone adopts each one and has each implanted into a surrogate mother--a staggeringly unlikely possibility--they have no hope of survival anyway.
Yes!
if it could heel people then everybody would stay alive and then everyone would die of hunger before anyone could be saved
This is one of the best biology sites i've seen in a long time.
we've got to move on, get over it!
anything to save lives
I wouldn't like to be told by the nurses that they're just gonna let me die if I was in coma.
Well, that's your choice, and your family and society should respect it. The embryos we're talking about here are not capable of choice. They aren't sentient beings. They have no awareness. No thought. No personality. They can't feel pain. They are in the earliest phase of development. They are clusters of about 100 cells.
They are potential people, but, to my mind, not people yet.
Choices for these embryos have to be made by their parents. How would you feel if you WANTED to donate your "leftover" embryos to help cure, say, your father's Alzheimer's disease, but you weren't given the option?
And further, these embryos ARE going to die. Normally they're disposed of by the clinic. This way, at least they don't die in vain.
Stem cell research is good, but it has its problems.
I recently wrote a paper on stem cells and had to do extensive research on them. Firstly, They are proven and soon will be the most important field of medicine. Secondly, adult stem cells are as useful as embryonic stem cells. Thirdly, The benefits of stem cells outway their cons of stem cellls a milklionfold. The loss of one embryo can offset the gain of a hundred lives.
I have a good friend who is suffering from early onset Parkinson's. The idea that she should wait in vain for better treatment to protect eggs which are not now and will never be a person is ridiculous. If these eggs are not used for research, they will be discarded.
I think nature does a magnificent job at regulating itself. The more people goof around with nature, the more problems we create. Let nature do what it has always done so well.
This site does a pretty good job of explaining why scientists are interested in stem cells, what the issues are on both sides of the moral arguments, and what the current restrictions are.
For my money, I think that fertility clinics that create huge numbers of embryos that will never be implanted are irresponsible. But, that said, those millions of embryos are never going to become people. And they have no capacity to think, or sense, or feel. So if we can agree on guidelines for how they should be treated, respectfully somehow, then I think it's fine to create new stem cell lines from them.
I think stem cell research is pretty tightly regulated already.
I think we talk a lot about how all human life is precious, and how we should value the whole spectrum of human experience, when there's no potential cure for a given condition. But once a line of research starts to show promise, much less results, there's a line of people trying to get into clinical trials.
Which just makes sense to me. Were I facing the prospect of a long, frustrating, painful, debilitating, and ultimately fatal disease, I'd want to go out fighting, and using every weapon in our arsenal--stem cells included.
I don't think it's ethical to fertilize eggs to create embryos that you're ultimately going to destroy in pursuit of stem cells. But there's a vast and largely untapped supply of already-created embryos out there, as the previous poster wrote, that are never going to sense anything, much less become people. And it wouldn't even take many of those to create the stem cell lines that scientists need.
We pray for research scientists to hurry up their work. We have a young friend who is tetraplegic due to an accident and we are very anxious for him to get better. Thanks to stem cell research our friend has hope. For that alone, we thank you .
Stem cell research should be limited. Why? BECAUSE IT SAVES LIVES! Now I may initially sound crazy, but bear with me. In a world where overpopulation imminently lies in America's future, saving lives is the last thing the American government should do. By putting massive restrictions on Stem cell research, an indirect policy of population control would be facilitated. I agree that stem cell research would be moral if we were saving lives, but thats not the goal. Making the world a better place is our goal. Overpopulation is antithetical to that goal. The united states should get a hold on population control now before it gets out of hand. And if that means that the government hides behind the lame blanket argument "embryos are human beings," then so be it.
no way
I am writing a research paper on stem cells. I was a hundred and 20 percent for it until i got to the bottom of this page. In this i found a comment that was saying if stem cells worked we would have an overpopulation of people in the future. While sounding crazy this is very true. I was already torn between the whole Pro-Life and Pro- Choice issues but now i have a new argument. This is a very good point. However i still think i am for stem cells because they could save lives. Hopefully by the time we get to the point of severe overpopulation we will have a solution.
I am doing an extensive research paper on stem cell research. I am pro stem cell research. Does anyone have any links or help for me . It would be much appreciated!
stem cell research will lead to saving lives, some say great, not me! Saving more lives will only lead to gross overpopulation & the advancing destruction of our planet being excelerated by the excess drain on the planets resources. Before you jump all over me, my wife has cancer & my mother has MS & I do not believe that a cure will help the human race in the long run. Although I love them both very much & would do anything for them I would not want my support to harm the future of my grandchildren or their grandchildren
oh yeah YES it should be outlawed
Thats crazy I was like YES lets have stem cell research and save lives... but now, i think, overpopulation, and everything does happen for a reason... maybe we shouldn't mess with that...
Yes
Stem cell research can combat death, and even make the lives of people who were born abnormal live a normal life. It can make a child that is blind see again, or a person who is paralyzed walk again. The question about stem cell research is: "Who should die? Us or them(embryos)." The answer is obviously them. Here's an example, a student who was raised with a perfect life and had thousands of dollars paid to his/her education. And spent countless hours developing into a very needed/important profession such as a scientist that may discover the cure of cancer. And then this person was diagnosed with a disease like leukemia (taking example from Patrizia Durante) and had only six months to live. This person can either just die out and not be remembered, or they can be cured with stem cells. While there's people out there in the world who just get an abortion and and could not atleast give stem cells because of people who think it's morally wrong to make clones and such.
Even so there already has been new research that one stem cell can be plucked off the embyro while it still grows out to be perfectly fine, while that stem cell keeps dividing.
Patrizia Durante used umbillical cord blood stem cells for her leukemia cure. Stem cells from cord blood, bone marrow, and several organs are considered "adult" stem cells because they come from fully developed tissue. The cures for leukemia and many other diseases that we hear about in the news are all from adult stem cells, not from embryonic stem cells. Adult stem cells are not ethically problematic because no one is harmed, and we do not have to choose between "us or them."
The embryo, of course, might also be the brainy doctor who would have found the cure for HIV if allowed to live, but didn't get the chance for the rather random reason that he/she was younger and smaller than other humans.
Adult stem cell research is almost universally supported and it's also federally funded. Such research has been going on for decades and, as you say, has produced some tremendously exciting results.
Embryonic stem cell research, on the other hand, is hotly contested and relies almost entirely on private funding. It lags decades behind adult stem cell research.
I think it's misleading to suggest that embryonic stem cell research is a blind alley, a boondoggle, or will never yield results. Given the same amount of time and funding, embryonic stem cell research will likely also yield dramatic results.
I think your argument about "the brainy doctor who would have found the cure for HIV if allowed to live" is also flawed. I often also hear people similar things like, "What if Beetholven had never been born?" First, reasoning like this suggests that people's accomplishments are preordained, and I don't believe that's true. Second, while I would certainly not wish for a world without Beetholven, I can only say that because I've experienced the music. You can't mourn or miss what you haven't experienced in any way. Third, I think that focused research eventually produces results. We will someday find a good treatment or a cure for HIV, and it won't be dependent on any particular personality. And fourth, my knee-jerk reaction is to ask, "What about kids who die of malaria or malnourishment or totally preventable water-bourne or childhood diseases? Do you care about their opportunities and potential as much as you do the potential of a ball of undifferentiated human cells, with no ability to sense or remember?"
I do find your argument about not having to choose between kinds of human potential compelling. The refusal to elevate any sort of human life over any other kind of human life has a certain dignity to it.
Except that we have this problem of excess embryos created through treatments for infertility. All the embryos that aren't implanted (many!) are eventually destroyed, either purposefully or by accident. And since they're going to "die" anyway, isn't it worth thinking about how those cells could benefit mankind?
Stem cell research will only give people a good reason to abort their babies, right now if a woman aborts her child she knows it's for selfish reasons. If we legalize stem cell research more innocent children will be killed. The supposable parents of these babies will be able to say that the aborted their baby "for the good of society".
Hmmmm.
Most embryonic stem cells are harvested from embryos at the blastocyst stage of development: they're less than three days old, and they consist of four to ten cells.
No one could possibly know that she is pregnant three days after conception. So the potential harvest of stem cells could never be a "good reason" to abort a fetus.
"Right now if a woman aborts her child she knows it's for selfish reasons."
Let's be real careful before we say things like this.
no
Embryotic Stem Cell Research is wrong. It's used as an excuse for abortion way to often and even more lives are thrown away because of it.
You're certainly entitled to the opinion that embryonic stem cell research is wrong.
However, it is not used as an excuse for abortion.
Embryonic stem cells are extracted from embryos. Typically, these are embryos created in fertility clinics. When a woman undergoes in-vitro fertilization (IVF), she's given medication that causes her to produce as many as 24 mature eggs. These are removed and fertilized, creating embryos. Two to five days after fertilization, a few embryos are implanted in the hope that one or two will develop into a fetus or two. The rest are usually frozen for future use by the couple, or discarded.
At this stage, the embryos are only four to ten cells. They have no brain, central nervous system, mouth, heart, lungs, or internal organs. They can't sense anything. The cells are identical and undifferentiated. And stem cells can only be extracted from these very early embryos--long before a woman knows she's pregnant (typically 2+ weeks after conception), and way before an abortion can be obtained (usually between 6 and 12 weeks after conception).
many think stem cell research is ethically immoral, but what about people who are suffering from diseases such as leukemia, diabetes, or other life threatening problems?
would it be immoral to leave those to die? or would it be better to learn what we can from embryonic researches of babies of people who wants abortions and are willing to donate that much knowledge to the researchers?
am i saying it to be reasonable to kill the babies in mothers wombs to obtain useful informations and tools? no. and i totally agree with liza on the bottom of the page, that embryonic stem cell researches should and must not be an excuse to abortions because human lives are valuable. then again isnt that why are we trying to do stem cell researches???
Embryonic stem cell research does not involve abortion.
Right now it does, however, require the destruction of a human embryo--an embryo created in a lab either for that purpose or for fertility treatment.
I just want to make sure that we're debating the right issues here. :)
Just wanted to say that I think that stem cell research is important. I think we should let them research as much as they want as long as they do not use embrios. I think scientists should focus on the umbilical cord cell research that would benefit everyone and it would not be such an issue.
I am 31 years old and at 27, due to being born prematurely by 3 months at 1lb 6 oz, it was discovered that I need a double lung transplant. I had to leave my great paying job and go on Social Security. Three years ago I took a part time job with an atty who pays me $ 5.55 an hr. Yes that is illegal but it's something in my pocket and he lets me come and go for dr appts, if I am sick, etc. In 14 days I graduate with my second associate's degree. I would continue going to college as it is something to do, but am out of state funded financial aid and there is nothing out there otherwise, believe it or not- I have searched high and low. Because of this I can't keep going.
I also have diabetes, which has caused kidney damage and am bi polar.
What about my life?
I want to live and I want to be a productive member of society. I don't want to live on the Government. Because of my good paying job I get a good amount of social security- over a grand- a month but don't qualify for any other help because of that amount.
I believed in abortion until at 20 I gave birth at 4 months and my son legally lived for 3.5 hours. That made me have the choice that I would not choose that for myself but would not stop another from living the life they want, especially if a product of rape, financial, emotional, etc issues.
I have done alot of research on regenerating organs. Hence if there could be a way to save my life, have a new set of my own lungs, without thousands of dollars of monthly medication, to live with another's organ ( Which took me 2 years to truly decide I would accept) , why prevent people in my situation?
One person here outlined the life as having personality, awareness, etc.
If someone has unwanted embryos from fertility treatment, or the product of abortion ( as I am sure some of the means do not produce a whole product- sorry if I am wrong on this) that will save me, that will give me my life back, please don't deny me this.
yeahhh idk what to do... maybe you should go post an ad in the newspaper 5and ask for some unwanted embryos or the abortion... even though that is kind of weird, nothing personal or anything. i mena i know you want your life back and everything but why would you want someone elses life who wastnt meant to be.
nothing personal, just mah thoughts
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