What are embryonic stem cells?

Stem Cell Research Questions - What are embryonic stem cells?

• I am doing an argumentative paper for English on the topic of Stem Cell Research and I am trying to understand the process of how scientists derive their embryonic stem cells? At ...show more

• Answer:

  The embryos are salvaged from the IVF pile. The controversy is because the general public is not smart enough to realize a couple things... a-that by the time an abortion occurs its too late for an abortion b-that there is a trash pile of dead embryos created by IVF So, they hear dead embryos, they think late term abortions. The controversy largely (not entirely though) to the public not understanding where the embryos are coming from, and that most of them support (or at least not very strongly opposed to) the process that creates the dead embryos in the first place. With IVF, the woman's eggs are harvested from her body, fertalized with sperm in a lab, and then frozen. Each cycle, a few embryos are transferred to her uterus in hope that one will implant and become a pregnancy. Unfortunately, it usually takes several cycles, so at a min, to get a single pregnancy out of IVF you are killing several other children. Then there are usually embryos left over that didnt get used, or were damaged in the freezing/thawing process. These embryos get labeled as biowaste, and either out right incinerated, or used for research purposes before being incinerated. At the time all this happens, the embryos have less cells than the number of skin cells the avg human sheds in a single minute.