Madam, - The recent EU vote that gives the go-ahead for stem cell funding is one that many patients and scientists welcome. The need to produce new and viable alternative therapies that combat human disease has never been more important. It is imperative that Irish research scientists be allowed access this funding and carry out fully controlled and transparent research on human embryonic stem cells.
Currently, there exists a legal vacuum with respect to undertaking such research in Ireland as scientists like myself are prevented from doing so not by constitutional legislation but by the Medical Council.
Last year the Government-appointed Commission on Assisted Human Reproduction recommended that "embryo research, including embryonic stem cell research, for specific purposes only and under stringently controlled conditions, should be permitted on surplus embryos that are donated specifically for research". This commission consisted of people from many corners of Irish society and their important recommendations are awaiting Government response.
With respect to the current debate on stem cells, some arguments claim the generation of embryonic stem cells destroys human lives and that scientists should only work with stem cells derived from the adult human. I do not know if the fusing of egg and sperm cells in an IVF laboratory to produce a two-week-old embryo that is stored indefinitely and not implanted into a woman constitutes the creation of a new human life. I suspect that we will never know the answer to this question.
But I do know that a two-week-old embryo that is left under liquid nitrogen storage is not the same as a seven-year-old girl with leukaemia or a 32-year-old woman with multiple sclerosis or a 55-year-old man with Parkinson's disease.
All of these patients deserve as much help as possible from society and embryonic stem cells that are known to possess better therapeutic potential than adult stem cells are a possible means of achieving this goal.
Scientists should never claim that stem cell research is the answer to conditions like Alzheimer's disease, as trying to regenerate something as complex as human brain tissue in the correct way is extremely difficult. It remains to be seen if stem cell research can cure these terrible diseases. However, the successes that have already been achieved suggest that this kind of research should be pursued.
We won't know the answers until we do the research. - Yours, etc,
GAVIN DAVEY, Neuroscientist, Trinity College, Dublin 2.
Madam, - I commend the Irish Catholic bishops for condemning the June 15th decision of the European Parliament to approve tax spending on embryonic stem cell research.
Genetic science has great potential for either serving or degrading humanity. Its proper use requires moral reflection and the establishment of moral limits.
There is in no scientific evidence to suggest embryonic stem cell research has more potential to lead us to viable treatments for various diseases than non-embryonic stem cells.
Embryonic stem cells carry the likelihood of immune rejection in humans. Animal trials suggest that they are too genetically unstable and too likely to form lethal tumours to be used for treatment.
Tests using human adult stem cells, however, have produced significant and encouraging results in the areas of Parkinson's disease, spinal cord injury, cardiovascular disease, sickle-cell anemia, and dozens of other conditions without posing any moral problem.
On a biological level the pre-natal being is not like any other tissue: it is human with its own DNA indicating that - as a human - it has the same fundamental and moral right to life as any other human being.
Politicians and lawmakers have a moral obligation to protect human life in all phases of its existence from conception to natural death.
We must help those who are suffering, but we may not use a good end to justify an evil means. Hence, the cry should be not for an increase in funding for embryonic stem cells, but rather an aggressive expansion of adult stem cell research.
If a man takes on the power to fabricate man, he also takes on the power to destroy him. The human being has the right to be generated, not produced, to come to life not by virtue of an artificial process but of a human act in the full sense of the term: the union between a man and a woman. - Yours, etc,
PAUL KOKOSKI, Columbia Drive, Hamilton, Ontario.