Stem Cell News

It has apparently been some time^[1] since I last wrote about stem cells. It is not that they have not been in the news, but that I do not feel that there has been anything significant added to the debate. An article yesterday in in Slate changes that.^[2] It takes a serious look at the ways in which recent developments will potentially split those who are against embryonic stem cell research into differing (I will not say "opposing" here, I think that is too strong a word) camps. It also reveals rather more of the details, of the potentials both implicit and explicit, of the new proposals than I have previously read or heard. The potential for one of the cells take to develop into a fully formed, fully alive and unquestionably human child in its own right for example.

It looks hard at the ways in which this will potentially blur the lines of what is human and what is not, where one starts to be a life with a right to live, versus a mass of cells. And in doing so, it, almost certainly accidentally, exposes the importance of the Church's stance against artificial method of creating life. For all of them lead, necessarily, to this, and to this blurring that we now face.