An Embryonic Debate

Newspapers, radio and television regularly report on scientific breakthroughs in—and public protests against— human embryonic stem cell research. Actors Michael J. Fox (who has Parkinson’s disease) and the late Christopher Reeve (who was paralyzed after a spinal cord injury) have been high-profile advocates of research to derive and study human embryonic stem cells. In the political arena, President George Bush and Senator John Kerry hotly debated embryos and stem cell research throughout the 2004 U.S. presidential election campaign. Internationally, human cloning for stem cell research has been on the agenda of the United Nations for the past several years, where discussion continues on an international convention against the reproductive cloning of human beings. In academia, embryonic stem cell research was recently and breathlessly described in the pages of the esteemed New England Journal of Medicine as “the great biomedical promise of our time.” So what are we...