The Lies Of Embryonic Stem Cell Research Objections or One Woman With Two Souls Ridicules Religious Zealots

Don’t you just love it when evidence emerges challenging unprovable religious preconceptions espoused by the Pope, the Roman Catholic Church, hardline Islamists, not to mention beloved President George Bush and his own fundamentalist Christian supporters.

What they all believe is that at the instant when an embryo is formed by fertilisation of a human egg by a human sperm, a “soul” gets installed in the entity to make it a true human being. If the person leads a good life, like George and his UK pal Tony Blair, his or her soul will go to heaven. If they’re naughty, the soul goes to hell.

It’s also why (especially in the eyes of President Bush and the Pope) it’s akin to murder to create an embryo then destroy it to obtain potentially useful things like stem cells to treat living people with disease and injury enduring horrendous suffering every minute, every hour and every day of their lives.

So what happens when a living woman turns out to be a chimera - a combination of tissues from two, separately fertilised eggs, which by chance, fused together in the womb to create a single person composed of two genetically distinct types of tissue? The cases of two such people, both women, were featured in the US on Wednesday in a documentary on ABC.

Their unusual condition was discovered after routine tests showed that they were genetically unrelated to at least one of their children - even though they’d given birth to them! Eventually, by testing the child’s DNA against different tissues from the mothers, the genetic link with matching chimeric tissue was proved beyond doubt.

At least 30 such cases have come to light. The big question is: how many souls do these women have? The body of each contains living remnants of both original embryos, so neither of the original “twins” died, but only one individual resulted. via New Scientist.

This questions the fundamental idea of embryos having a “soul” in the first place. Not to mention that these embryos are anyway destined to be destroyed. So all we are asking is using embryos targeted for destruction to be used to save millions of human lives. Is that so hard to empathize with?

I have repeatedly stressed on the stupidity of arguments of so-called-pro-life lobby and created the stem cell research blog to provide patients around the world with stem cell related news and views.

I hope and live for the day when earth-is-round mentality is finally replaced by science. Stem cell research objections are not about religion but about ignorance, an unfortunate malady which both Bush & Pope suffers from.