The Ethical Dilemma
Although it is often reported that the use of stem cells in research or medicine is morally questionable, a lot of people are unclear as to what the ethical issues associated with stem cell research actually are.
First of all, it is important to know that the main ethical issues are mostly associated with embryonic stem cells (ESCs), which were the only pluripotent stem cells available for use in research for a long time. To understand why some people have ethical concerns around the use of ESCs, we need to understand where they come from.
Every human being once consisted of a tiny clump of pluripotent embryonic stem cells. These ESCs differentiate over time into all sorts of specialised cells that make up all of the body’s organs, and in turn the entire human body. As the name suggests, ESCs are obtained from an embryo. More accurately, ESCs are the cells that reside inside the blastocyst (the structure that forms after an egg has been fertilised), which will subsequently go on to form the embryo. If these cells are removed (for example to be used in medical research), no embryo will form, and the remaining blastocyst will die off. And this is the critical point. What once had the potential to become a human being has been destroyed to serve a scientific and/or medical purpose. ESCs are usually obtained from blastocysts that have been created during in vitro fertilisation (IVF) but are not going to be used to establish a pregnancy, and have been donated for research by the man and woman whose sperm and egg produced the blastocyst. In these cases any blastocysts that are not implanted into the carrier to result in a pregnancy will be destroyed anyway. However, for people who believe that a human embryo should be recognised as a person at the moment of conception (i.e. when the sperm fuses with the egg), this utilisation of ESCs constitutes ethical concern. Due to this, there are divergent country-specific legislations in place regarding the use of ESCs. Indeed, the use of ESCs is legally restricted in countries such as Germany, Austria, Italy, and Portugal.
The bottom line is that no matter what one’s personal view on the issue is, research using ESCs will always have these ethical questions attached to it. There was therefore a huge drive among researches to create a type of pluripotent stem cell that is ethically unobjectionable. The solution to this problem may be induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs), which we will cover in our next post.
