Adult stem cell technology is more advanced and has recently moved into the clinical trial stage (Bohlin, 2004). It involves removing stem cells from a patient's body or another adtlt's body, indubing them to become cells of a particular type, such as heart muscle cells, by treating them with chemicals, culturing them (growing them so they make more cells), and then inserting this new cell mass into a place in the patient's body where new tissue is needed. An example of this would be a situation where bone marrow stem cells are taken from an individual and induced to become lung cells, which are then cultured to produce a mass of lung cells. These would be inserted into a patient's lung to replace damaged tissue from lung cancer. Such therapies previously had encountered problems due to the difficulty of enticing adult stem cells to become other types of cells. The procedures previously available involved using cells of the organ in question to produce more cells of that same organ, such as using skin stem cells to grow more skin that could replace damaged skin on a burn victim. Recently, however, the technology has advanced to allow the use of stem cells to create other types o

Public opinion against embryo stem cell research derives from two concerns. The first concern, often put forward by religious groups and those who do not believe abortion to be moral, is that human embryos should retain the rights of grown humans and should not be used for research purposes. The second concern is related to another technology involving embryos, the new technology of embryo stem cell cloning. Embryo stem cell cloning can be defined as the transfer of nuclear or genetic material into an egg cell that has had its nucleus removed and then growing the remodeled egg cell into an organism (Bohlin, 2004). The first public claim to have cloned human cells in the United States came from the company Advanced Cell Technologies (ACT) in November of 2001. Previous to this, cloning had successfully been achieved in six species: sheep, cattle, pigs, goats, mice, and cats (Bohlin, 2004). However, human stem cell cloning had proved trickier than working with these other species. ACT was only moderately successful in its attempts at cloning humans, as the cloned cells created would grow to a mass of six cells and then die. This growth was not sufficient to allow for harvesting stem cells that could be used in research (Bohlin, 2004).

Saad, L. (2004, June 22). The cultural landscape: what's morally acceptable? The Gallup Organization. Retrieved April 27, 2005 from http://www.gallup.com/poll/content/login.aspx?ci=12061

ACT publicized their achievement to the major news media, perhaps in order to garner public support for cloning research. As it happened, this had the opposite effect, leading to public fears that moral lines would be crossed as human cloning research advanced (Bohlin, 2004). For example, people feared that cloning would lead to the selection of breeding individuals with certain desired traits, pe