Ethics Behind Embryonic Research Roger Wicker, the representative of Mississippi in the U.S. Senate, said, “The choice is not between conducting the stem cell research or not conducting it. That is not the choice”. The ethical and moral debate surrounding stem cell research is not the research itself; it is how these stem cells are acquired. There is little doubt within the scientific community that stem cell research will result in many medical breakthroughs, much like the discovery of antibiotics in the 1940s. While stem cell research could provide a possible cure to a number of degenerative diseases, it is not ethical to harvest stem cells from human embryos because, there are alternative ways to obtain stem cells, and it is not ethical to destroy the potential for human life. In Stem Cells: An Insiders Guide Paul Knoepfler explains that the very definition of a stem cell is argued by scientist because many thing appear to function like stem cells but do not have the same genetic markers and visa versa (2). Knoepfler describes two essential features that a cell must posses to be considered a stem cell. The first is that is self-renews, or that it can undergo cell division and retain the exact properties of the parent cell (Knoepfler 3). The second feature being that the cells have potency, meaning that the cell can differentiate into different types of cells (Knoepfler 3). An example of potency would be that the first several hundred human cells that develop into all
