• Question: What are the moral implications stem cell research and Genome development?

    Asked by to Claire, Ian, Sergey, Vicky, Zena on 13 Jun 2014. This question was also asked by .
    • Photo: Sergey Lamzin

      Sergey Lamzin answered on 13 Jun 2014:

      Everything boils down to “How far are you willing to go in oder to improve/extend your own live?”

      There is no right or wrong here. You need to balance your own greed, love for yourself and compassion against each other. There can never be a global consensus.
      This is a question everyone has to answer for himself, I can only give you some similar questions in a different context:

      Are you willing to punch your classmate in order to take his lunch? – Are you willing to kill babies to extract stem cells?
      Are you willing to steal it hoping you won’t get caught? – Are you willing to extract stem cells hoping no one will notice?
      What changes if you were starving? – You are dying of cancer and these stem cells may save you.

    • Photo: Zena Hira

      Zena Hira answered on 13 Jun 2014:

      There are many opinions about it. As far as implicationsa are concearned there are two major problems

      1) The methods being used. Stem cell research involves killing 5 to 7-day-old embryos. This is a moral dilemma. Killing an embryo to let someone else who is sick live. It is really up to how you view it.
      2) How the knowledge will be used in the future. This might lead to cloning people. There is always the concern of how this might affect society. Even though no one can really tell if this will ever happen but what if it does? Again it could be harmless and fine but it could also go terribly wrong

    • Photo: Ian Simpson

      Ian Simpson answered on 17 Jun 2014:

      OK. We need to clarify that stem cell research does not have to involve the use of embryos at all, although they have been and will likely continue to be used in research aimed at developing the methods used to derive different cells types (primarily) for therapeutic applications down the line.

      A lot of effort in recent years has led to the development of techniques that can both harvest stem cells from adults and derive stem cells from previously differentiated cell types from adults (these are cells that have already decided what they’re going to be). For all kinds of reasons, some of which are moral, this approach is likely to dominate if not replace stem-cells sourced from embryos in the future.

      Originally it was thought that you couldn’t make (or harvest) stem cells from certain types of tissue in the adult. Crucially, one of those was the brain. That is no longer true and indeed it is possible to derive stem cells from other tissues and then differentiate those into brain cells and use them therapeutically.

      You may also have heard of parents storing cord-blood from newly born babies as this is a very rich source of stem-cells which can be frozen and potentially used later in life for therapeutic purposes. Indeed stem cells derived from cord-blood have already been used to treat something approaching 100 different diseases to date.

      Unfortunately, and for fairly obvious reasons, the press tend to focus on the more sensational and controversial aspects of stem cell research rather than highlighting the rather amazing and myriad ways that they can be sourced (consensually) from adults (and cord-blood) and used to great effect in treating disease.

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