The compelling tales of infertile couples moved us to endorse creating the potential test-tube babies. And the hopeful pleas of the sick and injured are making us consider the idea of medical research on the leftover embryos. Now a British panel of doctors has suggested that their government allow cloned embryos for research purposes. This involves creating an embryo that is a clone of the patient and using that embryo as the source of stem cells, which would guarantee that the resulting tissue is not rejected. Yet perfecting a technique to clone human embryos would pave the way for any such embryo to actually be implanted in a woman to create a living, breathing human clone.
Stakes are high on both sides.
At congressional hearings last April, the former Man of Steel, Christopher Reeve, urged the use of embryo stem cells on spinal cord injury victims. To speak, he must wait for his respirator to swish air over his vocal chords. But critics of embryo research hold no truck with such rhetoric. Perhaps, but Prentice is articulating the concerns of many who are dismayed by the headlong rush towards embryo stem cell research and what it signals about medicine's increasingly cavalier attitude toward human life. Since removal of the cells destroys the embryo itself, some women have also voiced their concern that embryos will become nothing more than research fodder.