This is an issue I'm shocked people aren't discussing here on ProgressiveU. Clearly, this is an issue of importance - it's an issue that I think is going to be fought over in the coming years, after the fundamentalists get over their wet dreams of abortion-free America.

Christover Reeve (sp?) was victim of a spinal cord injury. He ended up dying, and his life might've been saved had stem cell research been legal.

Stem cells are, in essence, "blank" cells - they can form into whatever cell they want, whether it be a brain cell, a spinal cord cell, a heart cell, whatever it may be.

To me, this is a very double-edged issue. I think that it has it's good sides - we could save a lot of people who have injuries/incurable diseases that could be fixed simply with new cells. The bad side I see is just as powerful - what if a government is to use it as a biological weapon? Consider this - cancer can kill victims in mere days, given the right conditions. How about an accelerated cancer that could be injected into special perceived threats? Possibly a gas that infects the lungs?

There's also the possibiltiy of human cloning - which I am very much against. I think that people need to die. Something I say a lot is that there is no life without death - if people hadn't of died in war, of diseases, or of natural causes, all those people would be around today - and that's a big deal. That's billions more people that this world cannot sustain. Under a cloning system, the presumption is that all of us would live for an eternity, right? That is BAD, very very BAD. We've seen the results of overpopulation, not in humans, but it animals. I believe it was down in teh SouthWest somewhere, but there was this deer that was hard to find. So the government hired a bunch of hunters to kill the deer's natural predator. What happened? There was a BIG spike in the number of deer, and then, get this - a BIG drop. Why? The ecosystem the deer lived in couldn't support the new huge population - they all just starved to death, so they had to be nurtered back to a decent condition for many decades afterword.

The same would happen to humans, if cloning came true. And cloning, I think, would be made a lot easier with the research of stem cells. I have no real opinion on this issue; there simply, to me, is not enough data to support any particular opinion. The research is seen as unethical, so it'll probably take years before the big debate comes along, as I'm sure it will.

What do you guys think?