Master Cells of the Human Body

Two of humanity’s main priorities are at stake: protecting life and curing disease. Embryonic stem cells are the solution to the many unanswered questions surrounding these priorities. Many people question why scientists cannot simply use adult stem cells for their research instead of using embryonic stem cells. Adult stem cells have been researched for a much longer period of time and some treatments have successfully been developed from them. There are a couple of major constraints on the use of adult stem cells. They have proven to be very difficult to work with, one of the main issues being they are difficult to keep alive in the lab (Clemmit 703). The second constriction to using adult stem cells is that they are not pluripotent, or are unable to “replicate indefinitely…and…differentiate into cells representative of all three germ layers” (Singer 1). Adult stem cells are clearly not as useful as are embryonic stem cells. There is no doubt in anyone’s mind that it is unethical to purposely abort a child strictly for research purposes. However, once a child has been naturally aborted, aborted by choice of the mother due to other extraneous factors, or is simply lying in a pitri dish at a fertilization clinic, the precious tissue will otherwise go to waste. According to studies, “about 16,000 embryos are created in clinics each year, the majority of which are deemed unsuitable to transplantation in the mothers’ wombs” (Bettelheim 1067). There are estimated to be some 400,000 unused embryos in fertilization clinics, of which 8,000-10,000 will be simply discarded yearly (Clemmit 699). This waste of potentially life-saving stem cells is clearly unnecessary. At what stage of development should we consider an embryo a person with the same rights we receive? This long discussed concept is still in question today, with what seems to be no hope for consensus in sight for the near future. There are, however, some inevitable truths that we can find

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