California voters voted to pass Measure 71, a motion that would allocate $3 billion over 10 years to embryonic stem cell research. While Michael J. Fox, the protagonist of the film "Back to the Future," who has Parkinson's disease, and Brad Pitt, a well-known actor, are running around for stem cell research, Mel Gibson, the veteran actor who played the lead role in "The Passion of the Christ," has jumped to the contrary.
In an interview with Good Morning America's Morning News, the Catholic actor said that every human being "was once a tiny embryo" in the process of conception, and therefore questioned "how such a negative life embryo could be used for medical or scientific research".
In August 2000, an ordinary but world-renowned baby boy was born in the maternity ward of a Minnesota hospital in the United States. Adam Nash was a test tube baby created by his parents to save his sister from a rare genetic disorder, and a healthy embryo produced by doctors who screened for the desired genetic arrangement.
This "specially designed child" was created after several failed attempts to eliminate "less than perfect" embryos, providing valuable cord blood and matching bone marrow to his sister, saving her life in time. While the family was overjoyed at the arrival of two new lives, many people asked, "Is it ethical to bring another life into the world to save the life of one child?
But others argue that "having a child to save a child is the best of all reasons for having a child. People can have children for all sorts of crazy reasons, such as to save a marriage that is about to break up, to carry on a family tradition, or even to reduce taxes.
Cells that can do anything
What are stem cells? What is it about stem cells that has caused so much controversy across the world?
If we look at the pure function of stem cells, perhaps we can give them a simple and unadorned definition: cells that can do anything.
Stem cells can be extracted from normal human tissues such as bone marrow, skin, placenta, and cord blood of newborns. The so-called bone marrow transplantation refers to the transplantation of blood-forming "adult stem cells".
Since "adult stem cells" are extracted from the original tissues, their functions are more limited, but they are not involved in religious controversies about the ethics of life.
In contrast to adult stem cells, embryonic stem cells are almost "omnipotent" in terms of differentiation potential, and their usefulness is unparalleled by adult stem cells.
As the name implies, "embryonic stem cells" have similar morphology and characteristics to those of early embryonic cells that are prepared for conception into babies. It has a superb differentiation ability and can proliferate infinitely. Given enough information and guidance, it can further differentiate into more than 200 cell types throughout the body, with the potential to form any tissue and various cell types in the human body.
Thus, in the beautiful blueprint drawn by scientists, embryonic stem cell research, the newest medical technology, is gradually developing an unprecedented allure, and even in the face of many ethical controversies and legal challenges, it cannot be stopped from shining brightly, nor can it be stopped from the curiosity of researchers who dare to break the law and sneakily cross the line to conduct experiments.
Simply put, the intense tension between science and ethics originates from the process of obtaining "embryonic stem cells". Currently, some scientists follow the exact same procedure as Clone, in which asexual embryos are replicated in laboratory Petri dishes to extract their "embryonic stem cells".
Once the stem cells are extracted from the embryos, whether they are reproduced in the laboratory or naturally conceived by the mother, they will disappear before they can "come to life". If the birth of an embryo from the mother is a complete symphony of life, then the "embryonic stem cells" are a few notes that only have a prelude and then stop.
Some people think that these scattered and out-of-tune notes are in fact another way of life in terms of medical significance, while others insist that "it is no different from killing a human being". Clearly, the debate is about whether embryos can be "replicated" in the laboratory. Is an embryo a "human being"? Do they have the status of life?
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