The stem cell controversy may seem like a stale topic to some: the debate had its heyday in the years of the second Bush administration, reaching a heated climax in 2006 when the zygote-hugging President signed a controversial veto that restricted federal funding to research involving the destruction of human embryos. When in 2009, Obama reversed

these executive orders, biomedical labs across the country echoed with long-held sighs of relief. Stem cells have made comparatively few headlines since. Nevertheless, the issue is still relevant today. Several US states maintain a ban on all human embryonic stem cell (ES cell) research, and public opinion on the matter remains strongly divided. A Gallup poll published this year, for instance, revealed that a third of all Americans believe that human stem cell research is “morally wrong”. In 2010, a quarter of Britons and an astonishing 60% of Austrians said that human stem cell studies should be totally forbidden.

I think that much of the aversion stems (pun intended, I’m afraid) from ignorance as to what this kind of research actually involves. I completely accept the idea that not everybody should maintain a comprehensive knowledge of all modern science, so I can imagine why some people hear the words “embryo research” and picture cackling biologists creating Frankenbabies and designer earlobes. In reality, stem cell research is much less gruesome, and a lot more useful.

Extracting stem cells from embryos is not an unethical process. The embryos used are just four or five days old– essentially created by squirting semen onto a petri dish with some human egg cells on it, as in IVF treatment, a scientific technique which is considerably less contentious. Indeed, ES cells are often taken from excess IVF embryos that would otherwise have been discarded. The extraction process destroys the embryo, but at this stage it consists of a rough mass of less than a hundred cells and is unrecognisable as human, and more akin to a cauliflower. It is about the width of a human hair, and certainly lacks any structure needed for pain, thought, or even movement.

Some believe that terminating embryos is inherently immoral because life begins at fertilisation, making such an act is equivalent to murder. I sometimes wonder if these people know that, even in healthy human females, three-quarters of all fertilised eggs are spontaneously miscarried and fail to survive to birth. As many as half do not even implant into the mother’s uterus. If your ethical system counts the destruction of any fertilised egg as murder, the majority of women on the planet would have to be put behind bars.

In fact, it is not the morality of stem cell research that needs defending, but its ability to live up to the scientific hype. When ES cells were first isolated in 1998, they were hailed as the Next Big Thing in biology, as scientists promised stem cell-derived hearts in a decade. In the intervening fifteen years, they’ve realised that making organs is actually rather a tricky business - it’s only since August that scientists have been able to grow a small mat of heart muscle tissue capable of beating in sync.

An entire heart is still many years down the line, but stem cell therapy has nonetheless demonstrated its promise in simpler procedures. They were used as early as 2003 to allow a Korean woman to walk after 19 years, and in 2005 to restore the sight of forty people with defective corneas. More recently, in 2012 the first study involving human embryonic stem cells published results showing that its two vision-impaired participants demonstrated improvement after stem cell treatment.

There is nothing unethical about using embryonic stem cells. It is far more wrong, in my opinion, to block research with such demonstrable medical potential.