The Scientific Divide

Frankenstein’s Stem Cells

Mary Shelley’s horror classic is speaking to us today. The story of a scientist willing to forgo that day’s social morays and convention scientific standards to create life is a story of low level stem cell research. If Ms. Shelley wrote that novel today it would be about stem cell research which is generations more advanced than it’s antecessor of grave robbing and sewing scavenged body parts together to make a human being.

Shelley’s novel reminds us that when science practices the Machiavellian principles of ends justifying the means one thing that may happen is that science may not fully understand the end results of its creation.

President Bush has been the voice of morals for this nation in the stem cell research debate. Just as it is still considered repugnant to disturb the dead for the benefit of the living the President would not allow the government to become involved in killing the unborn for experimentation purposes or pharmaceutical profit.(click on above title.)

As a result of the President’s leadership in this area European countries began to exercise greater care for the cells which they were harvesting. European scientist decided that they would end their practice of destroying the life of stem cells which they were harvesting attempting to create organs, limbs and cloning techniques. They would instead use other methods that did not involve destroying cells.

Because of this new direction in the way scientist began to think about handling stem cells researchers have announced that they have found a way to do stem cell research without destroying life.

Researchers typically obtain human embryonic stem cells from embryos that are due to be discarded by fertility clinics. But many people abhor harvesting such cells for laboratory studies. As a result, President Bush has limited federal financing of such research to a few governments approved stem-cell lines, which are self-replicating stem-cell colonies.

Under the new procedure, human egg and sperm are combined in a laboratory dish and grown for two to three days, producing a cluster called a blastomere of about eight to 10 cells. One of the cells is removed and allowed to divide overnight. Then, while one of the divided cells is used for the genetic test, the other is grown into stem-cell lines for research.

Science in fiction or non-fiction has shown that it will not self regulate so it is up to leaders like President Bush to establish boundaries in which researchers should operate. When this is done science isn’t hindered science is motivated to become the problem solving discipline that it is supposed to be. This without going to the extremes of robbing graves or destroying life to create life.