Stem Cell Research Could Save 100 Million Lives
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Stem cell research is one of the most hotly debated and controversial topics these days. As it well should be, given that 100 million Americans who suffer from diseases and conditions such as Alzheimer's disease, broken bones, brain damage, severe burns, some forms of cancer, diabetes, Lou Gehrig's disease, heart disease, hepatitis, Huntington's disease, leukemia, lupus, muscular dystrophy, multiple sclerosis, Parkinson's disease, spinal cord injuries, and stroke could eventually be treated more effectively, or even cured, with the use of human stem cells. However, due to moral and ethical concerns, research on stem cells is in jeopardy due to bans by the U.S. government on using human embryos in the lab for the purpose of stem cell extraction and using federal dollars to fund embryonic stem cell research (Robinson, 2002). Despite these injunctions, stem cell research should be permitted and federal dollars made available to fund the research with such live saving potential.
A stem cell is a primordial type of cell that can be manipulated, through electric impulses, into developing into most of the 220 different types of cells found in the human body (e.g. blood cells, heart cells, brain cells, etc). Some researchers regard them as offering the greatest potential for the alleviation of human suffering since the development of antibiotics (Robinson, 2002)...