Pro-lifers hail stem cell breakthrough
A breakthrough by rival scientists in Japan and the United States could well mark the end of the long controversy over whether researchers ought to be able to create and destroy human embryos for purposes of extracting stem cells.
It was widely reported last week that the scientists had succeeded in making human skin cells behave like embryonic stem cells. If this technique can be perfected, it has the potential to make unnecessary the need for other sources of stem cells.
“It’s potentially huge, because you could, in principle . . . take somebody’s own cells and potentially grow them new cells,” Dr. Kelly McNagny, a stem cell researcher at the University of British Columbia, told the Vancouver Sun. “They’d be perfectly matched.”
Pro-lifers have long objected that the destruction of a human embryo is tantamount to killing a human being. Defenders of the practice said it was essential to the development of stem cells that hold out the best hope for cures for a variety of major ailments as varied as Parkinson’s disease and severed spinal cords.
Many scientists warn that this latest discovery is still in its early stages and that it would be premature to shut down every other area of stem cell research. Even so, pro-lifers feel vindicated.
“This is the breakthrough everyone’s been waiting for,” Dr. Tadeusz Pacholczyk, director of education for the National Catholic Bioethics Center, told the Boston Globe. “These new strategies remind us . . . it is never necessary for laboratory researchers to cross fundamental moral lines in order for science and medicine to advance.”
To the editors of the conservative journal National Review, this latest advance vindicates the premise upon which many – including President George W. Bush – based their decade-long opposition to the destruction of human embryos for research purposes: “the conviction that scientific advance need not require, and should not compel, the abandonment of ethical principles, and especially the principle of human equality that should cause us to cherish and guard every human life, from beginning to end.”
