Stem cells are the cells that exist in a fetus during the early stages of development inside the mother. These cells have no function and have the potential to become any type of cell in the organism. When these cells are harvested, they are not harvested from an actual human with a fetus, the egg is fertilized in a lab (in-vitro fertilization) and is grown into a blastocyst. This process takes about 5 days and once the stem cells are harvested from the blastocyst it is discarded. A blastocyst aged 4-5 days contains about 50-150 cells. Once these cells are harvested they can be used to examine the effects of disease on people, and have the potential to cure life threatening diseases. This specific type of stem cell research is known as embryonic stem cell research as the cells are derived from an embryo. The reason this is such a controversial topic is that there is a debate about whether the blastocyst is considered a human or not.
Thesis: Stem cell research should be funded because it provides a solution to many life-threatening ailments. The scientific community also needs embryonic stem cell research to further other types of stem cell research that do not involve …show more content…
In hospitals, today if you have an organ afflicted by disease, let’s say part of patient A’s lung, the tissue needed to fix his lung is harvested from a donor lung. This leaves his lung treated by the part of the donor lung that isn’t used is discarded because it cannot be kept viable anymore. Now if patient B needs an entire new lung there isn’t one because they used part of the donor lung treating the patient A’s lung. If we can advance embryonic stem cell research, scientists could grow the part of the lung needing to be replaced in the lung for patient A and patient B can have the entire lung. This is will cut organ donation wait lines significantly, saving more
Thesis: Stem cell research should be funded because it provides a solution to many life-threatening ailments. The scientific community also needs embryonic stem cell research to further other types of stem cell research that do not involve …show more content…
In hospitals, today if you have an organ afflicted by disease, let’s say part of patient A’s lung, the tissue needed to fix his lung is harvested from a donor lung. This leaves his lung treated by the part of the donor lung that isn’t used is discarded because it cannot be kept viable anymore. Now if patient B needs an entire new lung there isn’t one because they used part of the donor lung treating the patient A’s lung. If we can advance embryonic stem cell research, scientists could grow the part of the lung needing to be replaced in the lung for patient A and patient B can have the entire lung. This is will cut organ donation wait lines significantly, saving more