Stem Cell Research Persuasive Speech

Imagine someone afflicted with a spinal cord injury, who led an active life before becoming quadriplegic. Now, he spends his days in a wheelchair, depending on a portable ventilator and the help of others to survive on a daily basis. The well-known actor Christopher Reeve suffered this exact scenario, speaking out for the necessity of stem cell research for diseases like his until his death. Given the clear essentiality of embryonic stem cell research to our progression as a medically and humanely advanced society, actions must be taken to encourage its development. The U.S. government should promote stem cell research by increasing federal funding of private research, legalizing certain methods of embryonic stem cell extraction, and educating

Under the Obama administration, a previous Bush regulation restricting funding of stem cell research to only 21 embryonic lines was overturned, expanding the number to 75 (Mears 1). While this is a shift in the right direction, it remains insufficient on its own; the government must further increase the budget allotted to the National Institutes of Health in order for labs to access more resources, as well as promote communication and cooperation between research centers. Stem cell laboratories require many pieces of sophisticated equipment including tissue incubators, clinical grade centrifuges, specialized microscopes, cryogenic freezers, and vivariums (Wesselschmidt 1). In order to obtain the most accurate and ideal results, researchers must have access

Even if scientists receive more public funding from the U.S. government, they remain banned from using cloning methods to produce human embryos as a source for stem cells (Abraham 1). However, researchers at MIT have recently developed a method of using cloning to produce genetically modified embryos, which are unable to fully develop into fetuses (Abraham 1). This technique allows for the harvesting of differentiable pluripotent stem cells, analogous to those collected from the inner cell mass of the viable embryo; however, there is no destruction of a life form because a cloned embryos has no capacity to ever become a fetus. In addition to exploring the cloning method, scientists also use the morula method, by which a cell is removed from a developing embryo at the morula stage (Green 18). There is already a precedent for the use of this method in pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (PGD), since “it is highly likely that removing a cell or two will not result in the death of the embryo because it any cell removed can be replaced by the remaining cells” due to cell fate not yet being determined at the morula stage (Green 18). By allowing publicly funded researchers to use these new extraction techniques, the government would promote the growth of the embryonic stem cell field