why many awaiting transplantees die; not only are there not enough spare organs to go around but the few available organs need to also comply with a patients individual system or they are useless. Scientists have learned that this slow and often times fatal search for an adequate organ can be bypassed through cloning. For example, victims of Leukemia often time die because an adequate donor of bone marrow can hardly ever be found. However, by cloning the bone-marrow cells of that patient, new material can be given that would save their life. Unfortunately, this facet of cloning is the one that has had the most trouble being accepted by the public because of its ethical implications. Right now, scientists dont have the technology to simply clone a persons individual cells; they must rely on stem cells. These are cells that are capable of becoming any type of tissue in an organism (Wilmut 53). By isolating stem cells and then manipulating them, scientists could turn a stem cell into whatever kind of cell they desired. The main concern of Stem Cells is not an issue of what significance they have but rather of their origin. What scientists do currently is take healthy cells from a patient in need of an organ, remove the genetic material from their cells and put it into an empty egg. The egg would then begin to form into an embryo (actually a clone of the person whose cell was used) and begin to divide into the different types of cells that make up the human body. These early embryonic cells, which are stem-cells, could then be transformed into whatever material is needed such as skin cells for burn victims in need of a skin graft or kidney cells for people in need of a kidney. This is where the problem lies in many peoples eyes because a human embryo is killed in order to harvest its stem cells. So the question is When exactly does an embryo become a person? Britain, which legalized Stem cell research in January of 2001, belie...
