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Going to the roots of the stem cell debate

In the minds of many people and the public press, the term 'stem cells' has become a magic password for entering a medical utopia where physicians will be able to overcome all human ailments once and for all. The hope for this 'brave new world' comes from tiny cells that are still undifferentiated but have the potential to become a variety of different cells. By directing their growth and development, biologists could potentially use them to grow therapeutic 'spare parts' to treat diabetes or Parkinson's disease or to heal paralysed persons—just to name a few uses of this technology. In the most extreme vision of this future, even aging and death could finally be defeated as failing organs would be replaced by new ones freshly grown from stem cells. Although these goals are not yet within reach, they have already triggered intense medical research and have drawn interest from the public and the bio‐pharmaceutical industry.

But the glossy promises of stem cell research are overshadowed by serious ethical questions that result from the origin of these cells. Pluripotent stem cells cannot yet be generated from cell lines. They have to be taken from a human embryo at an early stage of development. At the moment, the most important sources are aborted or spare embryos left over from in vitro fertilization. It is this method of stem cell generation that has drawn most of the criticism. Medical treatments using stem cells are not yet available, so the actual dilemma is not their application but rather the direction that research should take since it needs these cells and consumes their source now. If we want to pursue medical research using embryonic stem cells, we have to face the problems that the extraction of these cells from a human embryo brings with it. …