• Question: Do you consider experimentation on human embryos to ensure advances in germ-line therapy is morally right?

    Asked by r1ch to Chris, Kay, Kerstin, Lorna, Liv on 17 Mar 2010 in Categories: .
    • Photo: Olivia Hibbitt

      Olivia Hibbitt answered on 17 Mar 2010:

      Hi r1ch,

      well actually germ-line therapy is illegal! Experimentation on human embryonic cells isn’t really about making changes in the germ-line. Most researchers use these cells as tools to make basically every cell in the body, to understand differentiation, what genes get turned on in cells to make them neurons instead of muscle cells and questions like that. Human embryonic cells could also be used to make organs in the lab to transplant into people that need them. This sort of stuff is going on now and I have to say I don’t have any moral objections to it. I suppose you have to make an individual decision about when you consider an ’embryo’ to be a ‘person’. Having had kids I didn’t really consider them to be actual entities until they were born…..and to be totally honest babies are so helpless until around 3 months I question whether they are individuals until that time!

    • Photo: Kerstin Zechner

      Kerstin Zechner answered on 17 Mar 2010:

      Yes, I think it is. But this may be because I’m not really religious. A lot of the embryos that people use for stem cell research are taken from unsuccessful IVF treatments and would therefore be destroyed anyway. Also, the embryos are only ~100 cells large when they are used for experiments. If the research using embryonic stem cells has the potential to save lives and ease suffering, without itself causing any suffering, I am totally for it.

    • Photo: Kay Penicud

      Kay Penicud answered on 19 Mar 2010:

      Last year a research group managed to turn normal cells into stem cells. I think now we are developing that technique, it becomes more ethically dubious to use human embryos.

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