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Real Answers™
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Copyright: © 2007 Gregory J. Rummo
860 words

ETHICAL CLOUD OVER STEM CELLS LIFTING

By: Gregory J. Rummo

In the movie The Matrix, man does himself in through the arrogance of his scientific achievements. It is a story of Artificial Intelligence run amuck. A race of machines man has designed turns on him and wages global warfare. The machines win, subjugating humans into a macabre symbiosis. They clone humans, raising them in artificial wombs solely to harness the minute amounts of electricity produced by the body's biochemical processes. By use of a computer simulation called The Matrix, the machines create a virtual world in order to deceive humanity into believing that life is normal. But it is merely an illusion, an elaborate facade composed of billions of lines of computer code. The movie and its two sequels was great science fiction. But as is often the case in this fast-paced world of technological advancement, yesterday's science fiction often becomes tomorrow's scientific reality.

When the world first heard of stem cells and the promise of miracle cures, it was as if Jesus himself had returned to earth to give hearing to the deaf, sight to the blind and health and well-being to people with all types of debilitating diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson's.

Stem cells are truly remarkable and they may in fact hold the promise for miraculous cures. The problem among ethicists was that apparently the best source of stem cells came from human embryos and to harvest them meant that these embryos had to be destroyed.

Embryonic stem cells form when a sperm cell unites with an egg. The resulting embryo begins to undergo division. The cells that are first formed are “undifferentiated,” having the capability to become every type of cell in the human body. Under normal conditions in the uterus, differentiation quickly begins and what was originally just a mass of cells begins to grow into organs, skin, bone, nerves and muscle. Harvest undifferentiated cells and one can alter the genetic material theoretically growing a liver or a pancreas.

When Roe vs. Wade became the law of the land in 1973, one statement that was made was that an early stage human was simply a “blob of protoplasm.” The relative success of this argument came from our lack of medical knowledge at the time. Technologies such as ultrasound, now existing in 3-D and 4-D formats and capable of rendering real-time images of the fetus were in their infancy. Medical science had not yet been able to see inside the uterus and observe that by as early as 17 days cell differentiation had begun and an embryo had a neural groove that would become a brain stem or by 21 days cardiac muscle begins to contract—the equivalent of a beating heart.

Along with this knowledge came incredible advances in neo-natal care including the ability to deliver and save babies delivered more than three months prematurely.

While the scientific landscape has changed over the last 34 years with regards to “life,” such myopia had never existed for pro-life Christians and Jews who have always taken God at His word. In the Psalms, David wrote, “I was sinful…from the time my mother conceived me,” a reference not to the act of sex being sinful but that at the point of conception, a sin nature and therefore an eternal soul was infused into the unity of sperm and egg.

Even so, for some pro-lifers, theirs was a painful defense. To deny the right to explore the possibilities of miracle cures to prolong and save lives led critics to brand the pro-life community as insensitive and cruel. No surprise then that the news this past week, that stem cells can be grown from skin cells was received with open arms.

Shinya Yamanaka, leader of one of the research teams at Kyoto University in Japan, said in an e-mail interview with the magazine, Science News Online: “We are now in a position to be able to generate patient- and disease-specific stem cells without using human eggs or embryos."

In a review of the book “When Choice Becomes God,” By F. LaGard Smith, (Harvest House Press, 1990) Bill Muehlenberg of “Culture Watch” writes: “…In 1857 the US Supreme Court ruled that blacks were ‘non-persons’ and therefore could be legitimately owned, bought and sold as slaves. In effect the 1973 Supreme Court Roe v. Wade ruling said that a fetus was a non-person, which could be kept or disposed of at the whim of the mother. In either case the choice belonged to the “owner”. But as Joseph Sobran has observed, “those who favor the option of abortion, or slavery, refuse to take into account the human nature of the option’s victim. Extending choice to the slave himself would amount to abolishing slavery, and the same holds true for abortion.”

One hopes this latest discovery will prove to be so significant as to forever end both the procedure and the ethical debate over the cloning of human embryos; a procedure involving both slavery and abortion—two practices that should be abhorrent to any civilized race of beings.

Rummo is a businessman and writer. Contact him at GregRummo.com       

"Real Answers™" furnished courtesy of The Amy Foundation Internet Syndicate. To contact the author or The Amy Foundation, write or E-mail to: P. O. Box 16091, Lansing, MI 48901-6091; amyfoundtn@aol.com

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