Session 6 – Other Modern Day Issues

In this session we will look at several other issues that Christians need to be prepared to

give an answer to

Unfortunately, we cannot address every modern day issue out there, so we limited it to the most

important ones that we could find

Stem cell research

What’s the big deal?

It provides great potential for discovering treatments and cures to a plethora of diseases including Parkinson's disease, schizophrenia,

Alzheimer's disease, cancer, spinal cord injuries, diabetes and many more.

Limbs and organs could be grown in a lab from stem cells and then used in transplants or to help

treat illnesses.

Scientists and doctors will be able to test millions of

potential drugs and medicine, without the use

of animals or human testers. This necessitates a process of simulating the effect the drug has on a specific population of

cells. This would tell if the drug is useful or has any

problems.

How stem cells work

An advantage of the usage of adult stem cells to treat disease is that a patient's own cells could be

used to treat a patient. Risks would be quite reduced because patients' bodies would not reject

their own cells.

Adult stem cells act as a pool from which the body can repopulate itself with cells when old ones die out. When a skin stem cell divides, it forms a skin

cell and another skin stem cell.

Three varieties of stem cells existAdult stem cells

Paralysis Patients

Adult cells transplanted from nasal tissue into the spinal cord helped to heal damaged tissue

26 patients were able to regain sensation in their lower body, bladder control, and even arm and leg

movement

Some paralysis patient were able to walk less than a year after having the surgery

Adult stem cells have been successful

There are no ethical problems with this type of stem cell procedures

This style of stem cells are safer, and have been shown to be effective

The latter is retained as a future source of skin cells; the former migrates to the body's surface and takes its place among other

skin cells.

Curing blindness (Corneal diseases)

20 patients – 16 regained sight or increased level of vision

Diabetes

Of 250 diabetics, 200 did not have to take insulin shots for over a year

Heart Patients

Four of five patients were taken off the heart transplant list

Cancer patients

Used to cure people who are paralyzed

The use of adult stem cells and tissues derived from the patient's own adult stem cells would

mean that the cells are less likely to be rejected by the immune system.

These forms of stem cells work great!

Also a lot safer for patient

Umbilical Stem Cell

Stem cells can be found in places, but the younger, more flexible stem cells in the body come from a

newborn’s umbilical cord blood and tissue. There are many advantages of newborn stem cells over other

sources of stem cells.

They’re used to treat many life-threatening diseases, including anemia, leukemia and certain other cancers, primarily for a family member or genetic match. They’ve also shown in laboratory

studies the potential to heal serious conditions like brain damage for the child’s own use.

Newborn stem cells are not embryonic stem cells. Collecting, storing, and using them is

not controversial.

FDA recently approved a trial to enable researchers to determine whether stem cells

obtained from umbilical cord blood at birth can cure autism. The trial’s goal is to evaluate whether stem cell’s therapy has any effect on language and

behavioral difficulties experienced by autistic children.

There is a lot of potential in this method of stem cells that is being researched and should be

supported by Christians

The use of embryonic stem cells involves the destruction of blastocysts formed from laboratory-

fertilized human eggs. For those people who believe that life begins at conception, the blastocyst is a

human life and to destroy it is immoral and unacceptable.

Embryonic Stem Cells

This is where the ethical and Biblical issues come into play…

Why are people so interested?

Like any other new technology, it is also completely unknown what the long-term effects of such an

interference with nature could materialize.

These are derived from embryos that are not a patient's own and the patient's body may reject them.

Potential problems (besides the murder of a child)

Ethics is the big problem though

Embryonic stem cells can develop into any cell types of the body, and may then be more versatile than

adult stem cells.

Cloning

“A clone (from Greek klon) is an individual—plant, animal or human being—derived by asexual

reproduction from another organism that has the identical hereditary components.”

“Cloning is not a human invention. The Creator Himself planned this way of reproduction. When we

plant potato tubers of the previous year, the potatoes we later harvest are just as nutritious and tasty…

First off cloning isn’t an invention of man

We also see cloning in the animal kingdom. Aphids can reproduce both sexually and by cloning. In spring

the first aphid generation hatches out of fertilized eggs. Later, the aphid lays eggs that start to divide

without being fertilized They are clones of the mother. Many other animals reproduce by cloning: certain

bees, ants, crustaceans, and lizards.”

…This is because there was no new combination of hereditary information, with one plant being

pollinated with the DNA of another. They are in fact clones of the previous year’s plant.”

Concerning people, we know that identical twins are real clones. The fertilized egg splits in two, and each of these

two ‘daughter’ cells develops separately. They are individual people with an absolutely identical set of genes.

Cloning has been done successfully by humans

“‘The lamb has always been a symbol of innocence. This changed abruptly in the spring of 1997. “Dolly”, a barely

three-month-old sheep, hit the headlines, displacing politicians and pop stars from the front pages of

newspapers and magazines. Overnight, the fluffy white “lamb of innocence” had become a symbol of threat to

human society through an eerie new technology—cloning.’”

“Furthermore, humans are meant to have fathers and mothers, to be where possible the offspring of a

sacred marriage relationship, the family ordained by God.”

‘My own view is that the research [on human cloning] is immoral at the present time and should always be

immoral. To make the technique more efficient would require a great deal of experimentation. And to get

this more refined would be at the expense of having deformed babies, etc. To get it into a situation where you could clone humans efficiently would have such a

history of misery associated with it.

It took 277 tries to clone Dolly

the sheep

What about cloning

humans? Are there any

problems?

It would take many tries to be

successful

Humans were created separately, in God’s image, unlike the animal kingdom (Genesis 1:27). Our existence extends beyond physical death (Luke

16:19-31, Philippians 1:23). This is nowhere indicated for animals.

God allowed humans to kill animals (Genesis 9:2–3). Concerning other humans, He gave the

commandment: ‘Thou shalt not kill[the Hebrew רצח (ratsach) means ‘murder’]’ (Exodus

20:13).

Biblical argument against cloning

Cloning animals and plants are fine, humans are not.

God entrusted humans with dominion over the animal kingdom (Genesis 1:26). But humans were never told to have dominion over other humans,

nor manipulate them, as would be the case if cloning humans.

What about a popular medical procedure called in vitro fertilization?

Today, in vitro fertilization (IVF) is practically a

household word. But not so long ago, it was a

mysterious procedure for infertility that produced

what were then known as "test-tube babies." Louise Brown, born in England in

1978, was the first such baby to be conceived outside her mother's

womb.

In Vitro Fertilization is commonly referred to as IVF. IVF is the process of fertilization by manually combining an egg and sperm in a laboratory

dish. When the IVF procedure is successful, the process is combined with a procedure known

as embryo transfer, which involves physically placing the embryo in the uterus.

Is this practice ethical and okay for Christians (+ others) to practice?

When explaining step five (the final step) of the process, one article says the following

“Step 5: The embryos are usually transferred into the woman’s uterus from one to six days later, but in most cases the transfer occurs between two to

three days following egg retrieval. At this stage, the fertilized egg has developed into a two-to-four cell embryo. The transfer process involves a speculum

which is inserted into the vagina to expose the cervix. A predetermined number of embryos are suspended in fluid and gently placed through a

catheter into the womb.”

In vitro fertilization has been a source of moral, ethical, and religious controversy since its

development. Although members of all religious groups can be found on both sides of the issues, the major opposition has come from the Roman Catholic church, which in 1987 issued a doctrinal statement opposing IVF on three grounds: the destruction of

human embryos not used for implantation; the possibility of in vitro fertilization by a donor other

than the husband, thus removing reproduction from the marital context; and the severing of an essential

connection between the conjugal act and procreation.

“Imagine in a thousand years someone doing IVF with a long-frozen embryo just to see what a 21st century – or, in this case, 20th century – human

being was like. Just keeping them frozen – kicking the can down the road a little farther – seems wrong to me. . . . If you keep putting it off by

keeping the embryos in liquid nitrogen limbo, who knows how they may eventually be used?” Hank

Greely, Director of Stanford University’s Center for Law and the Biosciences.

Other Ethical Reasons

It’s already happened…A heartwarming report was recently published by the San

Jose Mercury News telling the story of a family whose year’s long dream of parenthood was finally realized

when a couple they’d never met donated their 19-year-old frozen embryo to them for adoption:

“Baby Liam Burke is just learning to crawl. But he was conceived when Bill Clinton was president, the World Trade Center stood tall and home computers had the

newfound ability to dial into something called the World Wide Web. Suspended 19 years in deep freeze, Liam is the

beloved new son of Kelly Burke – and one of the oldest embryos ever thawed and restored to life.”

This is a heartwarming story because it is the story of a tiny person that was given a chance at life. But, as

this story reports, over half a million more tiny Liam’s are waiting for that same chance – a chance many

will never get:

“Of these, about half will eventually be implanted into their mothers, according to ReproTech, a company

that specializes in long-term storage of embryos for $400 a year in its facilities in Nevada, Minnesota,

Texas and Florida. Most of the rest are discarded or donated to research. A lucky few – 1.5 percent – are,

like Liam, gifted to women like Burke.”

“Holding fast the faithful word as he has been taught that he may be able, by sound doctrine, both to exhort and

convict those who contradict.” Titus 1:9

Memory Verse