There are a lot here who will never condone the use of embryonic stem cells. It’s tragic that they are stifling avenues of research that could help people like you. I wish I could do more to help but it’s difficult to overcome the self-righteous surety of the willfully ignorant. Letting real people die so that we can save single celled embryos is insane.
The human embryo is a real human being at the embryonic stage of development. The fact that society has allowed so many human beings to be begun in harm's way does not change basic ethics.
In fact, to suggest that the circumstances of a human being's conception allows us to discriminate between one and another human being as deserving of rights or a simple reservoir of spare research material is not ethically acceptable.
Lapdog, the equivalent of your question is this: If the only options for a man on death row are to execute him or to to harvest his organs and stem cells in order to help others, then . . .
Of course, the "options" are not either/or:
I. The embryos that are frozen were the least promising of each in vitro cycle - the most healthy looking ones were implanted.
II. Harvard scientists and others all over the world are, indeed, creating embryos explicitly for use in research.
III. A cursory reading of the literature and even popular press articles on embryonic stem cell research will include the information that
A. more and more women need to be encouraged to donate or sell their eggs,
B. that both 'normal' and 'diseased' embryos are 'needed' for research,
C. that early expectations are that if embryonic stem cell research is to ever be useful, the cloning of a patient's own cells will be necessary,
D. no one knows how to control the embryonic stem cells in the body in order to only get the type of adult cells and organs needed, and
E. any tests with embryonic stem cells in human patients are at least 10 to 20 years in the future, because of all of the above.
IV. However, a more careful reading of the original post and so much more of the literature and a few special reports (including, if I may say so, my blog http://www.lifeethics.org/www.lifeethics.org/index.html ) will show that
A. animal models have been very useful in teaching us what we need to know about the embryonic stem cell,
B. that we are able to use umbilical cord blood cells, bone marrow and other body cells including the skin, the nasal mucosa, and from other organs of the patient himself, to develop or harvest "embryonic-like stem cells" or the specific adult stem cells we need,
and,
C. that it's more than likely that the actual environment and the local chemicals in place around an *adult* stem cell are the keys to acheiving regeneration and cures.
V. There is an obvious lesson from the fact that what will really be needed in actual patient treatments are adult stem cells, not embryonic stem cells: the focus should be on adult stem cells and how they work, not on embryonic stem cells.
VI.Did you read about the bone marrow stem cells that not only treat type II (adult onset) diabetes insulin production, but seem to also cause healing in the kidneys?
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/6123588.stm
http://www.webmd.com/content/article/129/117448.htm
http://www.firstthings.com/ftissues/ft0701/articles/condic.html
Mighty interesting reading on your favorite topic. Note that the author does such research at a high power University and knows the literature cold. That makes this indictment all the more compelling.
Frank
ESCR has never worked, it's been around for 25 years in animals and 8 in humans and since then, in 25 yrs. of research there has been no successful human clinical trial. Adult stem cells work. They've been working for 30 years in humans treating now 72 diseases.