Stem Cells
Stem Cells (Length 2:12)
The stem cell debate has been in this country for the last 10 years, really. Largely, the stumbling block has been the destruction of embryos. President Bush has had a moratorium on federal funds since August of 2001 for use for embryonic stem cell research, and there hasn’t been a way for researchers in this country to really get around it.
But now with some of the new methods that were announced in November––of being able to take, in this case, a somatic cell or skin cell and dedifferentiate it so it assumes the properties of an embryonic stem cell––I think changes the debate dramatically because it defuses all the objections to using embryos that many people in this country had that was holding back the federal funds. Very few people are going to have moral difficulty with removing some skin cells or some cheek cells or something like that if, again, the ultimate aspirations of stem cell research are achieved, which is developing some kind of therapies or cures for Parkinson’s and juvenile diabetes and spinal cord injuries and Alzheimer’s and the like. We don’t view just an individual somatic cell as having the same kind of moral stature as an embryo does or a blastocyst does. My sense is here that we might have a technological solution to what has been a real kind of ethical quandary for the last decade, and it might just transform the debate entirely so that stem cell research will really start to make the kind of leaps and bounds that have been promised for the last decade but have been hindered for both moral and political reasons.