Question: What is your opinion on Stem Cell research?

Liudmila Khokhlova answered on 17 Nov 2020:

Great question! Here I can elaborate a bit 🙂
Stem cell research can bring many benefits such as understanding of how diseases occur, scientists can generate healthy cells to replace diseased cells and so on. As long as the cells obtained in a safe and ethical way – I fully support stem cell research. There’re loads of regulations and rules of conducting any study are extremely strict. In the majority of the countries, such research is very well controlled.
People sometimes think that all stem cells come from unborn babies, which is not exactly the truth. Yes, in some cases, the cells come from a fertilized woman egg, but fertilization usually done “in vitro”, meaning in the lab. This cell never had a chance of becoming a human. Scientists can also get stem cells from bone marrow, amniotic fluid, umbilical cord blood or even fat, which could be done relatively safe. Recently scientists even came up with a way of genetically “reprogram” regular cells into stem cells.
So maybe in the beginning stem cell research might have been considered unethical, but nowadays there’re many ways of avoiding this problem. And benefits outweigh the troubles by far in my opinion.