Imagine that you are standing next to the person that you love the most. Now imagine that they have just been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, a disease that, so far, has been marked as incurable and that causes uncontrollable shaking. They would have to live for this for the rest of their life, right? But what if there was a way to have a cure for this? You would want this treatment to develop so that way they could get better. The only problem is that people do not think that using stem cells is morally right so there is no funding. This is how the conversation of stem cell research is going with one side saying that there should be funding helping this research with the other side saying that it is morally wrong since it uses fetuses that were aborted and donated to the research field.
Many people say that stem cells are morally wrong because in order to get stem cells that scientists are using to research have to be taken from embryos that are in early stages in the birthing process. What these people don’t understand is what exactly stem cells can do for all human life. Like the science writer David E. Newton, so far “hope for the medical potential [of stem cells] is high [and they] may provide cures to any number of diseases and disorders that are currently [resistant] to other forms of treatment” (Nardo 11). The diseases and disorders that could be cured from this research include Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s disease, and paralysis. The stem cells would be placed where the disease is taking place. For example, in Parkinson’s disease, stem cells would be placed in the brain to regenerate the brain cells that were damaged or lost. The list goes on with more brain diseases and other disorders that could be helped that were once thought were incurable. This research could change many lives and bring revolutionary changes to the medical field and possibly save multiple lives.
Many people say that scientists should just use adult stem cells since they are easier to take out and don’t kill the host when they are retrieved from the host’s body. The problem with this is that adult stem cells are much harder to get from adults and are more difficult to manipulate into other cells. These stem cells can only turn into cells that are like it, for example a liver stem cell can only turn into other liver cells which make these stem cells hard to use since they can only turn into a specific cell and no other cells. Equally important, the stem cells that are found in the adult body are so few in the body that they are almost impossible to retrieve from the body. For example, for every 10,000 cells in adult bone marrow, there is 1 adult bone stem cell (Nardo 15). There are just so few that it is nearly impossible to take out enough stem cells to multiply them. This then prohibits the quantity of the stem cell lines that can be created which are used to manipulate stem cells to make new cells. Therefore, embryonic stem cells are used more than adult stem cells.
Finally, less than half of the people in the USA are against this research and they have been very active about showing their dislike and they are the reason as to why the government does not fund this research. One reason being is that it kills young forms of life when the stem cells are extracted from embryos. What these people don’t realize is that the embryos donated to use in stem cell research would actually be thrown away. By being donated for science they are being doing something rather than being thrown away and could one day be a part of an amazing breakthrough in science. Also, these embryos are just a few days old so they are not technical human beings so they shouldn’t get the same rights as humans. But, if they are considered to be human, then to that standard “a petri dish teeming with living human cells cultured from someone’s cancerous tumor would be full of persons because they are human” (Lawrence), but this is not the case because people know what a person is.
With this information, you as the reader need to share this information with others so they can know about the possibilities of stem cells and that they are good things and can help us in one day. Now, when someone mentions something bad about stem cells, you now know what good they actually can do.