Word: stemming
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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With scientists in South Korea successfully extracting stem cells from a cloned human embryo last month, Harvard has vowed not to fall behind. Just last week, Provost Steven E. Hyman confirmed pre-existing plans to spend several million dollars creating a new center for stem cell research. Upon hearing about the Korean advance in February, the center’s co-director David T. Scadden had remarked, “It’s a terrible disappointment that we’re reading about it from other countries. It’s imperative that we be able to use this...
Scadden’s suggestion that the U.S. should catch up is most troubling because stem cell research using cloned embryos, as in South Korea, relies on a process similar to human cloning. Defending cloning-based stem cell research and attempting to distinguish it from complete cloning, researchers explain that the cloned embryo is never implanted in a womb. But this is merely a procedural, technical distinction. The difference morally between cloning an embryo to be used for research and cloning it to create life is much less clear: In both cases, the researchers are cloning a person and playing...
...there is a moral distinction to be made between using embryos for research and implanting them in a human womb, then the former is far worse. In the case of full-blown cloning, scientists are at least creating a life; but in the case of cloning-based stem cell research, they are merely creating life to destroy it. Embryos used for research have the same genetic structure as the human organism; they are analogous to fertilized eggs, capable under the right conditions of developing into fully functioning human beings...
Although a Faculty of Arts and Sciences report about the center, circulated in January, stipulates that “the Institute…proposes to address the complex social, ethical and religious questions that have arisen as stem cell research has advanced,” Harvard plans to proceed anyway with research which many Americans find morally repugnant. The center, then, is largely paying lip-service to ethical objections. Actually proceeding with controversial research is a very interesting way to “address” peoples’ concerns. Indeed, the University has shown no reluctance to shelve ethical...
...Harvard wants unabashedly to pursue stem cell research with all of the ethical baggage that carries, it should say without equivocation why it does not find the religious, ethical and moral objections to this kind of research to be valid. Harvard’s behavior to date, however, suggests that it is already confident in its answers to moral questions—namely, that such questions are not important and need not be seriously considered before proceeding—and that it merely needs to convince Americans of the intrinsic rightness of its position by presenting them with a fait...