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Stem Cells Should Not Be Used Therapeutically Essays

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Stem Cells Should Not Be Used Therapeutically

A stem cell is a cell in the body that can differentiate into almost any other type of cell in the body. Stem cells come from sites in the bone marrow, as well as the tissues of developing fetuses. The most controversial issue in stem cell therapy is the use of fetuses for their stem cells. Scientists want to clone human embryos, and use the stem cells long before the embryo matures (when it is only about 36 cells). This causes a large amount of unease in society, because people fear that stem cells and therapeutic cloning will lead us into disgusting and horrible experimental practices, as well as therapies. Most people in America do not want this horrible vision of the future to come …show more content…

People view them as madmen playing God, under the guise of “helping humanity as a whole”.

There are many reasons that embryonic stem cells should not be used. The main reason that the embryonic stem cells should not be used is because the embryo is terminated when the cells are extracted. Bush has passed a bill stating that he was “banning federal funding for stem cell research that involved the destruction of living human embryos,” (Commonweal, 2002, p8). This ban does not outlaw privately funded projects, so there could be many people working on embryos that they have attained. Bush did ban “therapeutic cloning” (cloning humans for “body parts” if the need should arise later in one’s life). If he did not step in and ban therapeutic cloning there would be free reign for anyone who had money to spend. There are many scientists world- wide who would like to clone their embryos from their patient’s DNA. The blastocyst of a developing fetus has “the ability to continuously and seemingly indefinitely proliferate.” (Economist, 2003, p 1005). This allows scientists to produce a fetus for an individual that will keep on producing stem cells for the life time of the patient. To have your DNA in the stem cells, gives you the advantage of less chance of rejection. Not all scientists want to clone embryos which will only be terminated for their stem cells. Most only want to use

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