Stem Cell Research Pros And Cons

Stem cells are the key to the body and its research should be promoted. Research may find out more about human body and may help cure diseases such as epidermolysis bullosa (EB) and diabetes. Some people might disagree because the most effective stem cell treatment involves embryonic stem cells which come from abortions or unused embryos. I support stem cell research because there are many pros for supporting it. Stem cell research offers hope for those suffering from diseases whose treatment options are limited. Every living thing has cells within them. Each one has a different title to them such as skin cells, organ tissue cells, muscle cells, and so on. In fact, there are over 200 types of cells in the human body, but how did they come

The stem cells come from aborted embryos. There’s a whole controversy with stem cell research since it involves abortion. Because of this, scientist have had to work their way around using embryonic cells. As I said before, they reprogrammed the adult stem cells genes to adapt like an embryonic stem cell. This all started in 1954 when the Nobel Prize for Medicine was given to the scientists who worked on the human fetal kidney cells which led to breakthrough of the polio vaccine (Gold). The debate over stem cell research has been going on for well over three decades. Congress, in 1995, constrained federal funds to create human embryos completely for research purposes, but in 2001, the Bush Administration developed a policy that would allow research to take place with federal funds, but 3 years go by and they have no support (Gold). The National Institutes of Health, or NIH, seeked direction from the counsel for its parent agency, while the Department of Health and Human Services, or DHHS, wanted congress to ban to stem cell research completely. Through all of these confusing debates, two states finally intervened. New Jersey gave 11.5 million dollars, for that current year, to promote stem cell research, while California gave three million over a span of ten years to promote stem cell research also (Gold). I am not completely for abortion, but if it’s necessary, or you know the child will not have the

It is caused by defects in various genes that are programmed to have proteins that associate with the top and bottom layers of skin. This defect causes skin to tear easy which then cause the painful sores. Unfortunately, there is no cure for EB. Patients with this disease treat the infections and wound-like skin with bandages. Researchers, a few years back, tried gene therapy “...by using a virus to add a corrective gene to skin cells cultured from that person and then grafting sheets of them onto his legs” (Kaiser). The repaired cells stayed, but the researchers were concerned with the obstacle of covering large portions of damaged skin cells and the virus used. Scientists were running out of options, they used induced pluripotent stem cells (iPS cells) which stunned them when they came across some EB patients having revertant skin cells. “Revertant skin cells somehow lose the disease-causing mutations and turn back into healthy cells” (Kaiser). Revertant cells only account for twenty to thirty percent of patients with