Expert: Griff Ruby - 6/16/2011

Question
If there was a technology out there, currently being researched, that potentially had the ability to cure the blind, make the bald hirsute and terminate diabetes or even give the chance for a couple who are dealing with fertility problems or the inability to have children, wouldn’t society want this subject of biotechnological research the cure of the future?

As a Christian what are your views on Embryonic Stem Cell Research? Has the publicity of this particular research affected your views?

Answer
Who would you be prepared to yank off the street and subject to heinously torturous procedures just so as to obtain from their quivering agonized body some elixir capable of healing all sorts of things?  During World War 2, the Nazis decided that Jews, Gypsies, and certain others were expendable as people and disposable and as such appropriate fodder for various medical experiments.  Today we look upon such experiments with horror, no matter what great medical discoveries might possibly have emerged from it.  If doing all that would have, for example, uncovered some cure for AIDS, would that have been worth it?
An unborn person is no less a person than anybody else, even though as yet undeveloped.  Their potential is incalculable, but if "harvested" for some sort of medical experiment that will never be known.
The whole idea of using actual human embryonic "stem cells" (what an admission that is!  "Stem cells," as in backbone and spinal chord, as in brains and ganglia etc. - what a long way things have come from when abortions were "excused" by merely calling it "fetal tissue" as though it were some unformed blob!) would never have got off the ground had it not been for Nancy Reagan back in 2004 who was quite easily manipulated in to coming forth in favor of such a monstrous action.
Of course, anyone can understand and empathize with how difficult and tragic it must has been to watch her own beloved husband slowly degenerate into a hollow shell of the man he once was as the Alzheimer's disease slowly destroyed his mind and memory.  In such a state of mind as she must have had back then, who can doubt that if only she could have yanked any number of strangers off the street and obtained by whatever sadistic and murderous process of extraction obtained from them some cure for him, she would have done it.  We can all understand such a feeling, but we should also all be able to realize that such a feeling is not a rational state of mind.  The real problem was that if she and he had been raving liberals that would have been merely taken as a matter of course and no change would have resulted from it, historically speaking.  But as she and her husband were such famous conservative icons, coming from them the rational public found itself demoralized and far too slow equipped to make any response, and then only far too little and too late.
So now, instead of being something no civilized person would have ever dreamed of tolerating, the use of innocent humans in such monstrous experiments has come to seem acceptable to quite a large segment of society.
Sorry for the delay in response, as my computer has been down.