Quote:
Originally Posted by Azure
Yes, those cells are being thrown away...and to a certain extent I agree with using them.
But eventually...you need more stem cells...and where do you get them from? Blastocysts come from 4-5 day old humans..or whatever you want to call it...so that means abortion. Are we going to turn to voluntary abortion...just for the advancement of science?
Because God knows that there are people out there would would sacrifice their child...just to help science out. Meaning they would reproduce...create a potential baby...and give it up for abortion so that science could use the Embryonic stem cells.
Now...adult stem cells does not require the destruction of the embryo. Why not go that route instead?
|
Stem-cell lines are self-replicating. Once you have enough of them, you don't need to continually destroy blastocysts in order to get them. That's one important point.
Also, I'm not sure I would describe fertilizing an egg in a petri dish and then harvesting cells after 3 days as an "abortion." In fact, abortion is not a way of getting stem cells--the products of conception are lost in the case of abortion. We're talking about something so infinitesimally small that it has to be created in a lab. If it were implanted in a human there would be no way of recovering it. To me, this is more than simply semantics. Abortion is terminating a pregnancy. A blastocyst in a petri dish isn't a pregnancy.
Adult stem cells are not undifferentiated. They're blood cells, nerve cells, bone marrow, etc. Also, they can't divide ad infinitum, meaning that in that case you WOULD have to continually re-harvest them--and they're just not as valuable as the other kind of stem cell.