Other alternatives - why risk it?

From Reuters: "The Church has always been opposed to the advances of science, but fortunately science has continued progressing. And thanks to that we live in better conditions," she said.

Now I am not Roman Catholic by any stretch of the imagination, but I think she is missing the point. When we develop new technology we hope to make everyone’s life better. The problem with this technology is not what it might offer, but rather what we might be doing while we develop it.

We argue that embryo's are not life, when we only have come to that decision out of limited knowledge. What if we are wrong? What if that embryo is true human life? I am speaking ontologically, not biologically here. There was a time that the greatest scientists in the world maintained that the earth was flat. That was not the fault of the Roman Church – after all, that was the position of the Greeks, long before Rome.

It maybe that an embryo is not "living" in the sense that it has "being", but I think we should go very gingerly down this road if at all. As it is said, "just because you can doesn't mean you should."

We have other alternatives to get stem cells for research – why do we have to risk it?