“Science can contribute greatly to making the world and mankind more human. Yet it can also destroy mankind and the world unless it is steered by forces that lie outside it,” insists the Holy Father in his new encyclical “Spe Salvi”
In the name of scientific researches and experiments in creating pluripotent stem cells hundreds and thousands of human embryos and oocytes have been destroyed in the laboratories.
The debate over stem cells derived from human embryos has been made to appear as a conflict between science and ethics, with science arguing for the funding of stem cell research to cure currently incurable diseases and ethics arguing against it. But ethically it may be more problematic not to fund human embryo stem cell research than to fund it, and scientifically no one can guarantee that cures for the currently incurable will soon be at hand.
The division between the moral opponents of human embryo stem cell research and its moral and scientific proponents is not of a sort that can be compromised. If a fully human life exists the moment sperm fuses with egg, whether within a woman or in a Petri dish, there is no way of doing human embryo stem cell research cannot demand that people who believe a fully human life exists at conception give up this belief, nor can they claim that this belief, ad the case against stem cell research that follows from them, is unreasonable.
A much-admired stem cell researcher Shinya Yamanaka, MD, PhD, has reported that he and his Kyoto University colleagues have successfully reprogrammed human adult cells to function like pluripotent embryonic stem cells. Because it circumvents much of the controversy and restrictions regarding generation of embryonic stem cells from human embryos, this breakthrough, reported in the journal Cell, should accelerate the pace of stem cell research.
These induced pluripotent stem cells, an invention of the Japanese biological scientist Yamanaka is an outstanding testimony for the other scientists, that is, any scientific research must not destroy the moral and ethical values and they must also remember “end can not justify the means”.
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