Blood by Lawrence Hill Page B

could help improve the lives of those who suffer from many terrible diseases — from juvenile diabetes to Alzheimer’s, from Parkinson’s to spinal cord injuries. And while scientists admit they are not yet certain, they believe stem cells derived from embryos have unique potential.”
    When the Nobel Prize–winning American physician E. Donnall Thomas was doing his work in advancing stem cell transplants, Canadians too were very involved with this pursuit. Ernest McCulloch, a Toronto-born physician and cellular biologist trained at the University of Toronto, teamed up with physicist James Till and proved the existence of stem cells in 1961. Two years later, they demonstrated two essential features of stem cells: they are capable of self-renewal and they can differentiate into more specialized cells. McCulloch and Till reached their conclusions by means of working with rats: first exposing them to potentially lethal amounts of radiation and then injecting them with bone marrow cells. They discovered that rats given more stem cells were more likely to survive. In their spleens, the surviving rats developed clumps of cloned cells that formed as a result of the stem cell injections.
    Since that time, stem cell research has shot forward. One of the most notable steps took place in 1998, when the University of Wisconsin biologist James Thomson successfully removed stem cells from an early human embryo that had been donated for research purposes. Thomson’s research ignited a debate that continues to this day: Are scientific and medical advances that could result from obtaining and using embryonic stem cells justifiable, in the face of moral and religious objections about the use of human embryos generally?
    Those who oppose embryonic stem cell research say that the embryo — even a surplus embryo that is stored in an in-vitro clinic, just a few days old, and destined to be discarded after it is no longer needed by the parents who produced it — is a human life and must not be destroyed for the purposes of medical experimentation. The Center for Bioethics and Human Dignity at Trinity International University in Illinois cites passages from the Bible in arguing that human embryonic life exists for God’s own purpose, not that of humans. Essentially, the center argues that people have no right to help themselves at the expense of other human life, and likens research using human embryos to other “horrific examples” of medical experimentation over the course of history.
    On the other hand, many people — including President Bill Clinton, who first proposed federal funding for embryonic stem cell research in 1999, and President Barack Obama, who in 2009 relaxed restrictions on U.S. federal funding for embryonic stem cell research that had been imposed nearly a decade earlier by George W. Bush — believe that the potential medical and scientific benefits outweigh the moral objections. Even the late South Carolina senator Strom Thurmond — an arch-conservative whom I will mention in another context in chapter three — argued in favour of the potential benefits from embryonic stem cell research. Many people who support embryonic stem cell research make a key distinction: the embryo normally used in such research is just a few days old, has been cultivated in an in-vitro fertilization lab, would not be capable of developing into a human being without further medical steps, and would normally be discarded at any rate because it would not be used in efforts to establish a pregnancy. (In the case of in-vitro fertilization, many ova are fertilized with sperm but few of the resultant embryos are actually used.)
    Although the debate has raged for years, other forms of human stem cells are available. Stem cells can be removed from umbilical cord blood without endangering newborn babies. And it is possible to use “adult” stem cells (which do not come only from adults — the