Stem-cell research poses ethical, political and humane concerns.

While I was listening to a public radio program about President Bush's recent veto of a Senate bill that favored stem-cell research, a lady called into the station. She read a statement dictated by her husband who suffers from ALS (Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis or Lou Gehrig disease), a devastating chronic illness that progressively debilitates and renders a person incapable of controlling muscle movement.

Hers were strong, moving words expressing utter frustration about the President's decision because of the hopes many have placed on that research.

I was certainly moved to compassion and reconsideration of my own former deliberations about stem-cell research. After listening to her, the rather radical opinions of opponents to the stem-cell research seemed odd. Then I listened with attention to the guest speaker arguing that when doctors do in vitro fertilization, the unused embryos are discarded anyway; so why not use them to help people be cured of these diseases. A religious leader invited to the program stated that manipulation of life is against God's will and pointed that there is a number of moral and ethical implications of this research.

Obviously, I do want to see humans finding ways to alleviate the suffering that these chronic diseases cause. But I am conflicted with the power we have abrogated ourselves to play with life without being able to predict the consequences of our actions. I feel and believe that we humans need to respect all forms of life and I always wonder what will come next as we become more and more invasive of the human body. In vitro fertilization took 25 years to be approved and science didn't stop there. Cloning followed and now stem-cell research. What's next?

When Dolly the sheep demonstrated that any cell of the body could be used to produce a genetic replica of the original body, biology was turned upside down. In 2000 the same Scottish scientists who cloned Dolly started to make chickens that could lay eggs containing medication. Nature raised alarms: Dolly's cells looked older than the ones of same age natural-born sheep and the mentioned scientists warned against cloning animals for meat and milk production because they found that cloned animals suffered immune disease deficiencies.

In the past two decades the most controversial issue in science has been stem cells. These cells can be produced by cloning or by a process called nuclear

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