Today, "Stem Cell Research" are household words. Everybody heard of this "promising", "futuristic" new science several years ago, and everyone thinks that they know what it is. If it is so promising, though, why hasn't it yielded the expected results?
In 1995, three years before the first isolation of human stem cells took place, Congress reluctantly passed a bill into law that contained the Dickey-Wicker Amendment, a provision which banned federal funding for any investigation which would endanger human embryos. This amendment, while clearly not in direct opposition to the stem cell research that would be found possible three years after its passage, has had the effect over the past decade of severely crippling our ventures into this new area of discovery. Under the Clinton and Bush Administrations, some feeble effort was taken to circumvent this amendment, but it remained until recently that Presidential policy directly interfered with Dickey-Wicker. In 2009, President Obama issued an executive order lifting the ban on federal funding for stem cell research, but just several months ago, a federal judge placed an injunction on this because of its opposition to Dickey-Wicker, and this injunction still stands.
Even though Dickey-Wicker only affects the federal funding of stem cell research, it is indicative of this country's blindness to the needs of our species. Today, humans suffer from a wide variety of deadly afflictions with no known cure, and stem cell research has shown glimmers of hope for those with these problems. Even those causing curable afflictions today are evolving into more developed strains against which we cannot protect, so why can't we stop our bickering and agree to push for research in this promising area? The total amount of sperm and egg cells that have been "wasted" in history by all of the natural somatic processes and by human ingenuity is nearly uncountable, so why can't we use those cells which would be otherwise "recycled" in order to further a better future for our species? The obvious "sanctity of life" counterargument becomes moot after a certain length of time, anyway: if every embryo that would be used for research were to grow into a human being, the Earth would quickly become overpopulated and the very policy preserving the sanctity of the embryos' lives would end up threatening the survival of our species. It is imperative that we eradicate contemporary policy regarding stem cell research and allow it to continue with the full power of society under its wings, investigating it like the responsible human beings that we strive to be.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/don-c-reed/remove-dickeywicker-time-_b_780071.html
http://www.dailytitan.com/2010/11/08/we-should-support-stem-cell-research/
1 comment:
When considering the ethicality of stem cell research, like with all other experimentation on “humans”, we must consider the fact that the risks of such research must outweigh the potential benefits. From a callous and utilitarian standpoint, the “death” of several stem cells for the cure of diseases for hundreds of millions of humans, it is clear that the potential benefits far surpass the cost of these embryonic cells. One would find it difficult to turn down the potential elimination of such a horrible disease like Parkinson’s, which affects about 6.3 million individuals world wide, so that embryonic cells could be “wasted” away in a freezer, unlikely to ever develop into human beings and extremely likely to be simply thrown away. This can be seen in couples who experience difficulty conceiving children. Doctors will create more embryos than needed so that if the implantation doesn’t work, there will be more embryos available for them to try again. Yet the price for keeping the embryos alive and frozen has been so expensive recently, that couples have simply been unable to afford to keep them any longer. The left over embryos which the couples can no longer afford to keep alive are disposed of by the fertility clinics. The main point from this is that, we shouldn’t be wasting embryonic stem cells simply because we believe it to be unethical, especially when embryonic cells are disposed of so nonchalantly today. We must ask ourselves if it is not more unethical to allow millions of people to die from currently incurable diseases, when we could put to use the embryonic resources we have to research cures. It’s seems rather obvious that the benefits of stem cell research to individuals and society extend much further beyond the consequences and loss of already existing human life if we do not conduct research with stem cells immediately.
Source:
http://articles.cnn.com/2009-09-01/health/extra.ivf.embryos_1_embryos-fertility-patients-fertility-clinics/6?_s=PM:HEALTH
http://menshealth.about.com/od/diseases/f/parkinson_three.htm
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