Session 6 – Other Modern Day Issues

1. 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

2. 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.

3. 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.

4. How stem cells work

5. Three varieties of stem cells exist Adult stem cells 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.

6. Adult stem cells have been successful • 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

7. 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. 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

8. 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

9. Cancer patients Used to cure people who are paralyzed Also a lot safer for patient 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!

10. 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.

11. 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.

12. 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

13. Embryonic Stem Cells This is where the ethical and Biblical issues come into play… 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. Why are people so interested?

14. Embryonic stem cells can develop into any cell types of the body, and may then be more versatile than adult stem cells. Potential problems (besides the murder of a child) These are derived from embryos that are not a patient's own and the patient's body may reject them. Like any other new technology, it is also completely unknown what the long-term effects of such an interference with nature could materialize. Ethics is the big problem though

15. Cloning “A clone (from Greekklon) is an individual—plant, animal or human being—derived by asexual reproduction from another organism that has the identical hereditary components.” First off cloning isn’t an invention of man “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…

16. …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.” 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.”

17. 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.’”

18. “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.

19. What about cloning humans? Are there any problems? It would take many tries to be successful It took 277 tries to clone Dolly the sheep

20. Biblical argument against cloning 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).

21. 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. Cloning animals and plants are fine, humans are not. What about a popular medical procedure called in vitro fertilization?

22. 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.

23. 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?

24. 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.”

25. 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.

26. Other Ethical Reasons “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.

27. It’s already happened… A heartwarming report was recently published by the San Jose MercuryNews 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.”

28. 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.”

29. Memory Verse “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