Blue Collar Scientist

So the Knight Science Journalism Tracker has given attention to another infuriating story about stem cells. It seems some researchers have developed pluripotent embryonic stem cells by taking embryos - blastocysts of eight cells - and removing one cell. In doing this, it turns out they have not harmed the embryo.

So you would think that the religious extremists who are “against stem cells” would be happy about this development, right?

Wrong. Read the stories linked to from the Tracker and see.

The anti-stem cell lobby has some pretty screwed up values, if you infer them from the vigour and subjects of their protest. They claim to be pro-life, and say their position is a virtuous and positive philosophy. But on closer inspection, the pro-life position is actually very destructive. They prefer that millions of humans suffer from potentially curable disease without even checking to see if the disease might be curable. Even if the stem cells used in the research harm no embryos.

But, they don’t care if you artificially create and bank an embryo at a fertility clinic, and a few years later the clinic throws it in the trash.

And although they are against snipping a cell off a blastocyst (leaving a healthy embryo) in order to have a stem cell to use for research, it is perfectly ok for a fertility clinic to snip a cell off an embryo in order to test if the artificially conceived embryo is healthy - even if they then throw away both the cell and the embryo when they are done.

Let’s make this a little more clear:

• Killing embryos because a big huge fertility corporation made too many to use: OK
• Killing embryos for research that will likely save millions of lives and end entire categories of human suffering across the globe: not OK.
• Snipping a cell off an embryo and then killing the embryo because you don’t like the results of the genetic tests: OK.
• Snipping a cell off an embryo and then letting the embryo live a healthy life: Not OK.

I’ll tell you right now that I don’t think a bastocyst is a human being. But if someone does, I’d be willing to listen to what they had to say about this kind of issue. There are certainly deep implications for this sort of belief. The problem I’m having is that the people who think blastocysts are human beings don’t appear to be able to think.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 14th, 2008 at 10:40 am and is filed under dimwits, religious extremism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.