The Ethics of Stem Cells

Early Human Embyro

For nearly as long as scientists have been studying stem cells they have self-imposed restrictions on themselves.  They have slowed to traditionally quick and unforgiving march of science to a snail’s pace in order to preserve the peace and happiness of the public.  The use of stem cells has furthered itself beyond simple in vitro fertilization.   Scientists now hypothesis they can now create whole new structures with human like qualities to study.  These thinks are called “synthetic human entities with embryo-like features” or Sheefs.  The ethics of Sheefs are highly debated and they themselves have vast potential in studying the human body and how it interacts with itself, but for now scientists can only use stem cells to study early embryos.  For a very long time the Biological community has being using a self-imposed 14 day rule where they would not keep an early embryo alive past 14 days.  This was always an easy rule to follow because no one could keep an embryo alive past 14 days, until recently.  Now scientists are pushing to push the amount of days back to 20 in order to conduct additional research on how to keep the embryos alive for longer.  This idea unnerves many people and sparked a large debate in the scientific community.  Inevitably the idea will go there however, at this point it is only a matter of time maybe months or even years if people let fear rule their decisions.

For the original New York times article here
For the article the New York times used here