A few weeks ago, responding to a request, I wrote about the dangers of embryonic stem cell research. (Read it here.) A reader named Joey (whom I don’t think I’ve met – please correct and pardon me if I’m wrong) just sent me this article, thinking it would interest me. He was right. The story tells the story of Song Chang Hoon, a 37 year old South Korean woman who had not walked in 20 years, who recently took her first steps. How did such a modern medical miracle occur? Stem cell research! But before you start going John Edwards on me, notice one detail: they were ADULT STEM CELLS.
Well, sort of. They were stem cells taken from umbilical cords. In other words they were not embryonic stem cells; they did not require the destruction of a human embryo.
So you hadn’t heard this story? Neither had I, so I googled for a while. I saw the story several times, (verifying it is real), but NONE of the “mainstream media” picked up on it. Had such an amazing result been attributed to embryonic stem cells, then you better believe it would have been a big story on the AP wire, the New York Times, and the Nightly News. Am I wrong here – has anyone seen this report out there?
The bottom line is that we do not need to harvest and destroy human embryos to do the research that could lead to breakthroughs like that in the case of Song Chang-Hoon. We do not need to destroy and degrade life in order to discover ways to improve it.