Stem Cells - Brutes or Angels: Human Possibility in the Age of Biotechnology - page 34

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stem Cells
embryos, Therapeutic Cloning, and Personhood
it is doubtful that natural sexual reproduction, with its risk of sexu-
ally transmitted disease, its high abnormality rate in the resulting chil-
dren, and its gross inefficiency in terms of the death and destruction of
embryos, would ever have been approved by regulatory bodies if it had
been invented as a reproductive technology rather than simply “found”
as part of our evolved biology.
— John harris, Enhancing Evolution:
The Ethical Case for Making Better People
not since Copernicus and Galileo removed earth from the center of the
universe and Charles Darwin placed the origin of humans and other ani-
mals on equal footing has a scientific discovery created more political, re-
ligious, and social controversy than the 1998 generation of human embry-
onic stem cells (ESCs).
in that year James Thomson and his coworkers at the University of
Wisconsin described how they used very early human embryos to obtain
cells that could revolutionize medicine. Thomson's work was honored in
1999 by the American Association for the Advancement of science as the
Breakthrough of the year, “a rare discovery that profoundly changes the
practice or interpretation of science or its implications for society” (1999,
2238). since 1998, cell biologists working with human esCs in laborato-
ries worldwide have laid the groundwork for regenerative medicine, a new
field that will someday cure now incurable diseases, repair tissue damaged
by strokes, heart attacks, and accidents, and offer humans longer, more ac-