It is clear that the future of medicine lies in stem cell research, offering treatment possibilities to an enormously wide range of diseases using the body’s own healing mechanisms. Despite this, stem cell research faces many ethical implications (particularly embryonic stem cells), posing a dilemma between morality and furthering scientific innovation.

What are Stem Cells

Stem cells are undifferentiated cells that have the potential to become many types of specialised cells. The ethical problems lie in collecting the stem cells a there are two separate types: adult (somatic) and embryonic. Adult stem cells are multipotent, meaning they can differentiate into a wide range of specialised cells, but they are limited and they eventually sensece. In comparison, embryonic stem cells are pluripotent, meaning they can divide into any cell type.

Why are Stem Cells Useful?

The potential of stem cells is massive, it is believed that they could be involved in the cure for Parkinsons’s, Alzheimer’s and type 1 diabetes. Conditions relating to tissue damage could become things of the past as scarred tissue from liver cirrhosis or scarred heart tissue from heart disease can be replaced without the need for an organ transplant. They are also useful in laboratory purposes as they are useful in making ‘knockout mice’. Knockout mice are made from mating two chimeric mice in which you can remove certain genes, giving a great insight into what each gene does.

Ethical Concerns

Adult stem cells pose little ethical dilemma as all the methods used to extract them pose very little risk, the most common being a bone marrow extraction under local anaesthetic. Ethical dilemmas are raised when embryonic stem cells are used because it can be seen as destroying an early human life, raising the ethical question: when does a human life start?

While those who argue against the use of embryonic stem cells argue that the embryo has a potential for life and therefore the elimination of it is equivalent to the taking of a human life. The argument against this is that there are countless spare embryos after fertilisation procedures that would be discarded anyway, so scientific testing that could save and improve lives is not just permitted, but the right thing to do.

To combat these ethical concerns, a surprising discovery was made that by knocking out 4 genes, adult skin cells could be reverted into pluripotent cells. This helps deal with the ethical dilemma of harvesting the stem cells, but it raises more questions relating to the idea of human enhancement.

Conclusion

This ethical dilemma is a cornerstone moment for human scientific research because it creates a line between morality and scientific research. How far are we willing to go to understand how our body works? Is it okay to cross moral lines against embryos in order to save more lives in the future? At what point do biological enhancements make a person inhuman? The answers to all of these questions will be used as the precedent for the future of medicine.