Letter: Critics of stem cell research miss the mark

Saturday, June 30, 2007 | 7:31 a.m.

William F. Brennan, in his June 26 letter to the Las Vegas Sun, manages to miss most of the salient points concerning embryonic stem cells. Most important , although it is true that treatment with nonembryonic stem cells has helped in a number of cases, the use of embryonic stem cells promises to help a vastly greater number of conditions, and that is why research in it is important.

Most people do not realize that human embryos (actually, zygotes or blatocysts, to use proper terminology) are required only for research. It is anticipated that for actual treatments, a nucleus of a patient's cell will replace the nucleus of a human ovum, and this will be used to grow tissue replacing the patient's tissue.

Mr. Brennan complains about the destruction of human "embryos." There are currently many thousands of human "embryos" stored in fertility clinics, gathered to enable otherwise infertile couples to conceive. One wonders whether Mr. Brennan objects to fertility clinics, which enable human life where none was previously forthcoming .

If not, one wonders what Mr. Brennan proposes be done with the zygotes, many of which have been stored for a number of years and are unlikely to be viable. Does he propose we draft women to implant them in?

Much of the objection to stem cell research arises from a religious ideology, the relatively recent and arbitrary notion that life begins at conception, and that it is sacred from that point forward. Although exact statistics are hard to come by, it appears that somewhere above 80 percent of fertilized eggs either fail to implant in the uterus, or spontaneously abort in the first few weeks thereafter. It swallows a camel to find sacredness or morality in this statistic.

Indeed, to use terminology favored by my more fundamentalist acquaintances, it basically makes God the biggest baby killer of all. But who are we to question the mind of God?

Carl Kaun, Henderson