This is in response to Eric's post concerning the potential benefits of embryonic stem cell research and the ethical debate surrounding this activity. He begins the by stating the potential benefits some believe embryonic stem cell research can provide, focusing specifically on organ transplants. He states that stem cells can provide patients with organ without any immune-rejection issues, which I have found in my experience to be a potential benefit widely toted by ES cell research advocates.
The second paragraph goes on to explain the ethical questions stem cell research provokes. He states that the main question in the controversy is whether or not an embryo constitutes a human life, and whether the benefits of embryonic stem cell research merit the sacrifice of a human embryo. He goes on to say that both sides of this argument are well-supported, and that they seem to be in a stalemate. He provides links to two websites, one arguing for embryonic stem cell research, and one against:
The article for ES cell research
The article against ES cell research
He states at the end that he finds the anti-research argument more compelling.
I found Eric's post to be fair and unbiased, and I thought he used relevant, logical statements throughout the post as well. His articles, however, did not do so in my opinion. The article supporting stem cell research spent much of its time explaining strange applications of embryonic stem cell research, such as infecting fully-formed embryos with various diseases and observing the effects of such an action. First of all, this would not be stem cell research, but human testing since the embryo would be whole, larger than a blastocyst (a 70 cell ball from which ES cells are harvested), and alive. It is illegal to expressly infect a human being to test diseases, and I doubt any group would successfully obtain federal funding for such research. It also argues that embryonic stem cell research reduces the scale of animal testing, which is unlikely since mice have been used as a human-similar test subject for decades. Before human testing can be performed, research institutes must perform extensive animal testing to ensure safety, so embryonic stem cell research arguably increases the incidence of animal testing. I felt that the article spent too much time covering obscure topics and not enough time focusing on relevant benefits of stem cell research.
I found that the second article often used ridiculous hyperbole and its arguments were often very illogical. The author of the said article at one point compared the extraction of stem cells from an embryo to lynching African Americans. These two events have almost nothing to do with one another; lynching is a hate crime and a horrendous, inhuman act made expressly to kill another human for killing's sake, while harvesting the ES cells from an embryo is an act which transforms something that would be wasted into valuable medical science. The author even went so far as to say that stem cell research will lead to the slaughter of newborn babies. If there is this much opposition to the killing of a 70 cell cluster, there will be no newborn babies killed.
This is not to say that many of the anti-ES research arguments are not compelling, their opinion is valid; I just thought the article Eric chose contained logical fallacies and too much hyperbole. Personally, I believe that the death of a 70 cell human for stem cell research is more human than the slaughter of say, a calf (which has a nervous system) for veal. Eric, kudos for your unbiased post, even though I don't agree with your articles. Cheers!
Here's the link to Eric's article
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