If you're like most Americans, you don't know very much about stem cell research. You support it though, and know that Bush doesn't. You probably know that stem cells are master cells that can become other cells and that Michael J. Fox thinks they'll cure his Parkinson's, but that's about it. Why would you know more? The news rarely reports on it as much more than a partisan political issue. Conservative pundits feed into your brain horrid images of godless Democrats wanting to take YOUR money to grow little fetuses in test tubes and then harvesting tissues out when needed. They want you to believe these extreme social liberals want to "create life to destroy it," and 'inform' you that if stem cell research is ever successful that countless embryos will have to be created only to be destroyed. They want you to believe the hundreds of thousands of leftover 100 cell blastocysts marked for destruction will all be implanted and otherwise become gifted "snowflake children" (You'd have to be soulless not to love a 'snowflake' child) if they aren't violently shredded for bizarre research. Wow, stem cell research sounds awful now, right? Sick to your stomach yet? Welcome to the world of political spin in a society where even science has become politicized. This is the last I will mention of political spin, and I will proceed to point out why all these attacks against the research are not only logical failures, but the result of grossly incorrect misinformation and intentionally twisted disinformation. Before I present the case for and against the research, I'll try to briefly explain some of the basics.

First, why would we want to do research on these controversial cells? The idea is simple: you can replace lost or damaged tissue that serves any function on ideally given part of the body. Of course, there are limits. Will stem cells ever be able to grow a foot for someone who lost a foot? Doubtful, at least for a very long time, but that's not to say the idea of limb regeneration is off limits: it's just not something related to stem cell research. For that you'd have to look into the very speculative idea of gene therapy based regeneration mechanism, mimicking sea squirts and flatworms (and that's a whole other topic). So what can we do with stem cells? A lot. Some low-hanging fruit in the field are to cure baldness and hearing loss (the cilia in your inner ear you lose with age which register frequencies and send them to the brain). Higher fruit is to cure diabetes, macular degeneration, Parkinson's, multiple sclerosis, and spinal cord injury. High hanging fruit is the scaffolding and construction of entire organs such as kidneys or even hearts. Yes, the construction of entire hearts from undifferentiated cells. Proof against concept, none; easy though, no. Just think about it this way: every cell in your body was at one time an undifferentiated stem cell. Now that we have these blank undifferentiated cells isolated, it's only a matter of time before we can create desired replacement tissues in the lab and ready for transplantation. A fireman gets burned and needs a skin graft, no worries! From a stem cell line we can recreate that lost skin complete with blood vessels, nervous tissue, sweat glands, and hair follicles. We have engineered skin today (and have for almost three decades now), but it can't be transplanted as it doesn't yet have blood vessels or those other fancy things.

A successfully derived stem cell culture is called a 'line.' These lines should be able to live forever with modern technology, and they continuously multiply. Have ten stem cells today? You can turn those into ten million stem cells if you want to, all identically matching the first ten. You can see now why, when stem cell research comes to full fruition why we don't have to keep isolating new cultures or fragmenting new embryos in the case of embryonic stem cell research. There are primarily three sources of stem cells. There are adult stem cells, ASC, which can be isolated from your bone marrow, for example. These adult stem cells are good in the sense that they do not cause tumors and are a perfect genetic match to you (so that your body does not reject them or require suppressing the immune system), but as of now (and possibly never), they can not be reverse programmed to become every type of cell in the body. For example, an adult stem cell can not become a nerve cell, so they're not going to be curing paralysis. Amniotic fluid stem cells, AFS cells, are a recent discovery. Pregnant women regularly give amniotic fluid during routine birth defect testing and they can be safely taken and tested from women ten weeks into pregnancy. The advantage of these AFS cells is that they again do not cause tumors and are a perfect genetic match to the newborn. An unborn need repair on an organ that could be fixed through stem cells? Have the tissue engineered before the baby is even born, then perform the surgery at birth. They have a great ability to turn into multiple cell types. They appear to be able to create nerve cells, for example, so they should ideally be able to heal spinal injuries. Bummed you don't have a Mason jar of your amniotic fluid sitting in the garage? Don't worry, Dr. Anthony Atala at the Wake Forest Institute believes 100,000 random amniotic fluid samples kept from routine birth defect tests could provide 99% of Americans an essentially perfect genetic match, meaning no rejection problems like organ transplants today. These also have a greater possible chance of eventually being able to reverse completely into a fully pluripotent cell. It's easy to get excited about AFS cells for these reasons.

The third type of stem cells, the particularly controversial type, are embryonic stem cells. These cell lines can differentiate into any type of cell, but have potential to cause tumors and can mimic cancerous growth if injected into the body at random. Nevertheless, they have the most potential with their truly pluripotent differentiation abilities. Where do scientists get embryonic stem cell lines? If you're restricted to ethical research, and you are if you're inside the U.S., you get these from in-vitro fertilization, IVF, clinics. When an infertile couple chooses IVF, several more embryos are made than are actually implanted to grow. The ideal ones are implanted and those not as ideal are frozen or destroyed right then. After the IVF couple is finished having kids, they can basically give them to an embryo bank, destroy them, or donate them to research. Hundreds of thousands are frozen today, and many of those are destroyed each day. It's easy to feel frustrated for this reason alone, watching those go to waste when they could be used to help others. And according to a recent survey of former IVF couples, over half of respondents would like to donate their left over embryos to research. The irony is that some can see IVF as acceptable when it is bound to create embryos that are going to be discarded, but to actually use those ready to be discarded is unethical. If you see the destruction of embryos as unethical, then you must outlaw IVF just to be morally consistent, as this is where the embryos are coming from. But you don't see anyone trying to stop infertile couples from trying to procreate. If you are talking about creating life just to destroy life, then yes, this would be ethically dubious, and I can see anyone who believes life as starting at conception objecting to the ethics of embryonic lines. But this is just not the case, as embryonic researchers have more than they could want already frozen and marked ready for deletion.

Of course, I must get a little more technical here as there is a type of embryonic stem cell that does involve creating a variation of an embryo for the sake of destroying it. These are known as personalized embryonic stem cells, and are created through a process called somatic cell nuclear transfer, or SCNT, and are at the root of a famous stem cell research scandal in South Korea. Researcher Hwang Woo Suk had claimed to have successfully created these such SCNT lines, but was later shown to have falsified much of his data. Since the scandal, scientists have only recently shown that SCNT in primates is very possible and near, but has not yet been achieved in humans. SCNT involves the placement of one of your somatic cells, like a skin cell into an unfertilized egg. At the 100 cell embryo stage of this egg and skin cell, your very own (close to perfectly personalized) stem cell line has been created. Is SCNT and the creation of personal stem cell lines ethical? I'm not even going to make a case either way here, so you can be the judge. I can only say that since I personally don't believe the combination of a skin cell and an egg is conception, nor do I believe life begins at conception, my own personal belief is that they aren't unethical. But the libertarian in me is very hesitant to say what is ethical when various ideologies validly come into conflict. SCNT stem cell lines are therefore the touchiest of all stem cell lines, and really the only ones with a valid reason to be unless you blatantly outlaw IVF, which would cause civil unrest in itself. But are personalized SCNT stem cell lines even necessary? At this point in time, there is not sufficient evidence to say that other stem cell types could possibly replace their entire need, but various discoveries in the field show that amniotic stem cells could possibly be reverse programmed to anything a personalized SCNT line could usefully do. This is purely unconfirmed speculation at this point, as the world is just getting started with this research and discoveries look promising. Most stem cell scientists are simply too afraid at this point to say that we'll never need SCNT, however, just in case hopes of reverse programming other stem cell types don't pan out as ideal, or not enough genetic diversity can be achieved through donated IVF embryonic lines. I'll cautiously add in here that other studies show we should be able to create an embryonic stem cell line without destroying the embryo, but to be frank it doesn't really solve much as you still have a leftover embryo.

Before I go any further, I need to make clear what 'embryo' actually means where I've been using it. It does not mean anything visually resembling a human, it has nothing to do with abortion, and it most certainly does not imply a fetus. An 'embryo' in the stem cell sense is a 100 cell ball known as a blastocyst. It's no bigger than a pin-head. All the cells are the same, completely undifferentiated; there are no brain cells, no nerve cells, no specialization. The only thing human about it is that it contains a human's DNA.

The first opposition you'll hear against stem cell research is often based on the idea that life begins at conception. I personally don't believe that life starts at conception, though my own point of view is simply irrelevant to this issue. I personally believe that life never starts at any given point; I actually think that every cell has a little bit of its own consciousness to it and each person is the collective of those collective consciousnesses. If I can keep you alive by keeping only a section of your brain going, then there is no specific 'soul' point- you're instead a collection of cooperating and competing consciousness. Anyway, this is a very brief summary of my own point of view, and it follows in my view that a simple 100 cell blastocyst (the very early stage of an embryo used in embryonic stem cell research) is nothing more than a ball of DNA and undifferentiated cells. However, even if you do believe that life does start at conception and that my view is absurd and heretical, the only type of stem cell research you can truly take issue with is SCNT, and again, I'm not going to contest you for opposing it.

Other oppositions you hear are people actually under the delusion that stem cell research involves making clones and harvesting body parts. If you learned anything from what I wrote so far, I hope you know that it has absolutely nothing to do with this bizarre sci-fi dystopia. We're talking petri dishes of blank cells. To make any kind of organ you have to carefully differentiate all the cell types of that organ and build them into a complex cellular scaffold that dissolves in the body, which is not an easy feat. You also often hear oppositions to using federal funding for the research. The reality is, right now there are restrictions on stem cell research. Ethically obtained human embryonic stem cell lines can not be researched in a laboratory that receives federal funds even if the embryonic stem cells are privately funded. And it's very hard at this early stage to get private venture capital because the research is still at basic stages and hyper profitable results aren't just about to pop out any minute. It's a slow process and basic research funds are needed. Keep in mind not a lot of money is even needed. 20 billion over 5 years in federal funds, for example, (a twentieth the cost of Iraq) would provide incredible results. In comparison, California's CIRM stem cell initiative, Prop 71, is a $3 billion project. Basic research funding is one of the few government spending applications I even support as a progressive libertarian.

A big task at hand now is differentiating the stem cells into various differentiated cell types. Part trial and error, this research requires lots of experimentation for results. However, results are visceral, and we now have adult stem cell engineered cartilage and bladders, the latter the work of Dr. Anthony Atala. More than a dozen people now in clinical trial with a congenital birth defect of their bladder are successfully now using these bioengineered bladders. This is only the beginning, and Dr. Atala is now attacking tubular structures like blood vessels through stem cells and scaffolding. Of course, I personally think the most successful research will be done as soon as the research is brought into the hands of anyone who wants to learn, a homegrown biotech revolution. Of course equipment prices will have to go down, massive wikis will have to go up, and those fascinated with science and engineering will have to organize. But I have no doubt they will, and that will be a fascinating time. Keep in mind the personal computer didn't become so amazing until it was actually placed into the hands of the people. Once the populace learned to hack, the computer revolution took off. Government e-mail was around for decades before the public could even play Windows Solitaire. But only a few years after that, people were shopping Amazon.com and eBay. Dedicated nerds catalyze change. I predict the same will happen with biotech.