Debate on controversy focuses on when an embryo becomes a life.

LA TIMES THE NATION - WASHINGTON -- July 19, 2001 - Aaron Zitner..An influential advisor to Bush on Wednesday became the latest of about 70 senators to support the research. Sen. Bill Frist (R-Tenn.), a physician and abortion opponent, said the research can be done ethically if it is strictly regulated.

For lawmakers who oppose abortion, embryo cell research has raised particularly thorny moral questions. Many have long believed that life begins at conception, which would imply that destroying a human embryo is destroying a human life.

But Sen. Gordon Smith (R-Ore.), an abortion opponent who supports the research, guided a panel of the Senate Appropriations Committee to Genesis, Chapter 2, Verse 7, on Wednesday. After reading the passage, Smith said it describes a "two-step process" for creating humans: First, God formed man from the dust of the ground. Then, the verse says, God breathed into man's nostrils "the breath of life; and man became a living soul."

Cells, Smith said, are like the dust of the earth, giving form to man but not "the breath of life." To gain that spirit, he said, the cells must be placed in a womb.

Seen this way, embryo cell research can be conducted without destroying a living human because the embryos taken for federally funded experiments would never have lived in the womb. Instead, they would be donated by fertility patients who had created embryos in the laboratory as part of the process of becoming pregnant.

Hundreds and possibly thousands of "spare" embryos are discarded each year by fertility patients who had created more than they needed.

[ ED Note: What this article doesn't address is that the parent's demand that the unused embryos are to be destroyed and not to be used for research. The hearings at the White House about this research also brought out that there is a real shortage of embryos which would not be changed no matter how much funding they receive under current laws. Many ovums will be necessary for research because of the failure rate. This implies that the laws would soon have to be changed again once they receive funding for the research.

Another professor explained in depth that the goal of researchers is impossible to reach. He said that the stem cells are only usable when they are between five days and eight days old when they are completely neutral and could, if it were possible, be programmed to become whatever body part the researcher wants it to become, brain cells, an eye, or a heart muscle etc.. It is not one program but thousands of programs before the part would be created from stage of development to stage of development during the growth process. It was easy to understand what he was driving at and that they are not going to be going anywhere with this possibility. Researchers implanted stem cells into a person's brain recently and that person went mad.

In the House of Representatives a doctor had a chart to show what some of the artificial stem cell research advocates. He showed an example of cloning. He said that they use young college students, give them a drug that causes multiple ovulation and anesthetize them to withdraw the ovum. They remove the nucleus of the ovum and replace it with another person's minute piece of skin. Life begins and the cells begin to divide exactly like that of a natural fertilized ovum. They look the same at certain stages. This "fertilized" eggs becomes a clone of the person whose skin it is. This is what they mean by cloning a person. Implications here is that they could clone anyone without their knowledge even.

The doctor showed dolly the sheep and pointed out that the sheep is alive. During Dolly experiments many fetuses aborted and many embryos had to be destroyed because of malfunctions. Imagine what a surrogate mother would be facing.

During the vote counting a black lady called in to CSPAN and told them that she was against stem cell research and cloning because they would choose white over black. etc.. and we are already over populated. It reminded me of Adolf Hitler.He had a laboratory experimenting to get an Arian race. He wanted the purest of the purest white race of perfect powerfully built, beautiful, highly intelligent, talented people. He met his maker and took a number of nations down with him in a very short time following these experiments.

It also brings to mind all the disease that has been brought on mankind due to the effects of pharmaceutical experiments on human cells. This body of ours has great healing capacity built in which is often interfered with by humans. How dare the Representatives use Biblical verses to convince their colleagues that they should vote for funding stem cell research in the name of the American people. Nobody asked us if we want these procedures.]

Some lawmakers say it is more ethical to use these embryos to help patients than to let them go to waste. And Smith, a Mormon, argued that these lab- created embryos are not equivalent to a person anyway. [Senator Orrin Hatch, a Mormon, echoes that. They are quasi Freemasons.]

"I believe that life begins in a mother's womb, not in a scientist's laboratory," said Smith.
A representative of the Catholic church criticized Smith's interpretation as "amateur theology."

[ED note: The pope was really pretty vague about stem cell research. He stated that creation of human embryos for research purposes, which some American scientists have begun doing, was an evil akin to euthanasia and infanticide. The Catholic Encyclopedia (1991) page 27 addresses only abortion as to either the removal of a nonviable embryo or fetus from the womb which would not include an ovum (an unfertilized ovum).
In 1989 the Code of Canon Law broadened the definition of abortion to include killing of an immature fetus which was brought about by abortifacient drugs. There is no law in the Catholic religion about this procedure outside of the womb before it is implanted. Catholics will have a loophole to get around excommunication that may incur which is the penalty for abortion by ordering it or cooperating in it.

It goes to say: Catholics who have been involved in seeking abortions or implementing them, however, should not despair of God's forgiveness but should seek absolution in the sacrament of Penance and healing through counseling and penance... " The writing again points to the womb what is in the womb. Scripture points to the living reality of the child in the womb in a graphic way is: etc.. establishes personhood of infants before birth in the womb, not outside the womb (cf.Lk 1:41) which could well be interpreted to mean that life begins in the womb.]

Richard Doerflinger, of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, called it "absurd" to think that the womb conveys the "breath of life" to an embryo. "An embryo's development is directed completely from within--the womb simply provides a nurturing environment." If scientists created an artificial womb, he asked, would a child born from it not be human? Could it be killed for any purpose?

Stem cells have drawn wide interest because they are able to grow into any cell or tissue of the body. [ED Note: only if scientists can find a formula to an energized code to tell the cell what it is supposed to become. It means that somehow by osmosis the cell has to receive this code and act on it, mind you, that is only one cell, multiply that by hundreds and hundreds of cells. The impossibility of this is obvious.

One possibility are the chips they are developing. I read today about a chip implant in the brain that takes over a persons functions when a person goes to sleep at the wheel. Like speaking into a computer to write without hands, the computer has to listen to one's talk first for a few hours to get it right, so would a chip be presented with a person's behavior patterns for the chip to be able to mimic the behavior. Can you just see that on the road. Computer chips driving the vehicles and the person fast asleep? What will they think up next?

This stem cell research is of course raising hopes that they can replace faulty tissues in patients. One possible application is in Parkinson's disease, which claimed Smith's grandmother, an uncle and a cousin, Rep. Morris K. Udall (D-Ariz.).

Michael West, chief executive of Advanced Cell Technology Inc., a Massachusetts company working with stem cells, said research is ethical on embryos up to two weeks of age. At about 14 days, he said, the embryo produces the beginning of a backbone. Until that point, the embryo can divide in two--producing identical twins -- or two embryos can merge into one. [Ed note: During a hearing a scientist said that the fifth day is the critical point and at that time it is a clump of cells, which means it has grown, which means there is life.]

"This is a line that nature has drawn for us," West said. It would be illogical, he said, to treat an embryo as an individual if it could still become two people. When the British Parliament this year authorized stem cell research, it said experiments could be done on embryos up to 14 days old.

Some theologians, including a small minority of Catholic philosophers, have also backed the idea that an embryo younger than 14 days cannot be a person. They reason that the soul, the hallmark of an individual, cannot enter an embryo capable of dividing in two.

[ED Note: What is a soul? New Testament: Psuche' [5590] soul, that immaterial part of man held in common with animals (Matt. 10:28; Rom. 2:9). The psuche', no less than the sarx [4561], flesh, belongs to the lower region of man's being. Sometimes psuche' stands for the immaterial part of man made up of the soul, psuche' in the restrictive sense of the animus, the life element, and the pneuma (4151), spirit. But animals are not said possess a spirit; only man has a spirit giving him the ability to communicate with God.]

Frist, a heart and lung transplant surgeon, drew on the ethics of organ donation to explain how he reconciles his opposition to abortion with his support for research that destroys embryos.

He noted that for organ transplants to become common, scientists and lawmakers had to change the notion that death occurred only when the heart and lungs stopped working. Instead, they built a consensus that a person was dead when brain functioning stopped -- a time when the person still had living tissue that could be used to save other sick people. [This means the body itself is still functioning while body parts are removed. A couple of days ago a mother, who was brain dead from an accident, gave birth to a fully developed infant. She bore that child from just becoming pregnant just prior to the accident to a full term pregnancy. Why at this particular time? Is God trying to help us make some good decisions?]

"We had to decide, after 2,000 or 3,000 years of thinking that death is when the heart and lungs stop to work, that it was something else," Frist said. Without the concept of brain death, usable organs would be "going into the ground or discarded."

Similarly, he concluded that stem cell research could be conducted ethically if the embryos destroyed were those created at fertility clinics that patients would otherwise discard.

But Brownback, an opponent of the research, said it would deny "the dignity of the young human, effectively making the human embryo equal to mere plant or animal life or property [a commodity]."

About 70 senators now back federal funding for the research, said Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.). If Bush bars federal funding, Specter is all but certain to have enough votes for a bill to overturn the president's decision. But prospects for such a bill are uncertain in the House.

Moreover, Frist's support comes with conditions that many research advocates find unacceptable. They include a limit on the number of embryos destroyed for research and a rule that the private sector perform the destruction of embryos and harvesting of stem cells.

Moreover, Frist would ban the use of cloning to produce embryos, a technique that West's company and others want to use to overcome tissue rejection.

However, Frist's guidelines might allow some research under strict guidelines.

Attempting to push Bush in the opposite direction, a panel of the United Methodist Church this week urged the president, a fellow Methodist, to bar research using human embryonic stem cells.

Smith was not the only witness Wednesday to draw on the Bible. In his testimony and in a later interview, West cited a parable from the New Testament book of Matthew, Chapter 25, in which a master gives gold to three servants.

Two go into the world and double their stake, pleasing the master. But one buries his gold in fear. "Thou wicked and slothful servant," says the master, chiding the servant for failing to be productive.

West said the federal government should not bury the chance to use stem cells to help patients. "We've been given an opportunity in medicine. To say it's better not to mess around in this area is not an answer."

http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/front/la- 000058925jul19.story?coll=la-headlines-frontpage

We are believers and it is inherent in us to be against abortion, body part traffic, the upcoming ovum traffic, cloning and stem cell research. This revolves around billions of dollars to be made with human body parts. It is about big business. Cephas Ministry