Recently the nation mourned the loss of a former President, and sadly he did not even remember that he was ever the Commander in Chief. Ronald Reagan suffered form Alzheimer's, a disease that affects nearly 4 million Americans. Every day a million U.S. children endure endless finger pricks an insulin shots, all in hopes they will over come the juvenile diabetes that rules their daily lives. Every time actor Michael J. Fox is seen on television, the public witnesses the way Parkinson's disease has ravaged his body. All of the diseases I mentioned, as well as scores of others, are incurable, often deadly diseases that impact and even destroy the lives of those cursed with them. They also are all diseases that federal funding of Human Embryonic Stem cell research could eradicate.
             Human Embryonic Stem cells are cells that are harvested from human embryos at approximately 3 to 5 days after conception [http://stemcells.nih.gov/]. What makes stem cells special is that they are at a stage of development where the can reproduce millions of times, and are able to be coaxed into becoming any type of cell in the body. The science to coax these cells to do as we wish is still in development, but there has been success by researchers at Harvard Medical School in using neural stem cells from mice to create all the different types of cells found in the brain [Freed p242].
             Much of the controversy currently surrounding hES cell research surrounds the question of when does life begin, and questions regarding cloning [Holland p. 187]. Even in 1999 former President Clinton was prepared to permit the federal funding of hES cell research so long as the government was not funding the extraction of the cells [Corn p118], and the National Bioethics Advisory committee recommended that any tissue gained for study is acceptable so long as it is the result of a reproductive effort, and is otherwise going to be disposed of.
             At 9:00 PM E...