The Catholic Church would have you think that anything involving these things would be tantamount to selling your soul, your children’s souls, and your children’s children’s souls to the devil himself. All for the price of a shiny nickel, at that. Medical science would have you thinking otherwise. Medical science claims that the cells might be the key to curing a number of conditions, and providing treatment for some of the most lethal conditions known to man. The science behind it is sound, but the Church is opposed to it because of the supposed price tag: human embryos.
Now, we’re not going to get ourselves into the ridiculous debate about whether or not an embryo is alive or is just a bunch of cells (I personally take the latter side, but that’s beside the point) here. We are, however, going to delve into the latest development along the scientific front of this argument, because let’s face it, even if stem cells cure cancer, the Church is going to stay the Church and renounce it as “the devil’s work,” like they’ve been doing to various scientific achievements since the Dark Ages.
The latest development involves sticking embryonic stem cells into the brains of mice. Why is this a major development, oh wise and all-knowing guru, you may ask? I’ll tell you, and I won’t even charge you $300 for it, like a certain group that claims to be a religion but is actually a sham. You see, scientists stuck a few of the cells into the brains of mice. Now, these injected mice were all suffering from a neurological condition that, oddly enough, is something that human children suffer from. Okay, the conditions are eerily similar, but they’re not exact replicas of one another. Anyway, that’s not the point. The point is this: the mice recovered.
That’s right, the mice recovered from debilitating neurological conditions that would have otherwise left them mentally handicapped for the rest of their lives. Well, as mentally handicapped as can be recognized in mice, at least. The fact that some of these mice recovered has put up a lot of hope for the same technique being used to fix similar conditions in human children. As soon as science works all the problems out and figures out why other lab rats ended up dead anyway.
The core idea of the treatment is fixing the defective wires running though the brain and spinal cord. This means that the broken ones will either need to be repaired or replaced. The human body is largely capable of regenerating any sort of cell, even brain cells and neurons. However, some conditions can make that task either too slow to do any good, or completely shut it down. Besides, a lot of damage can be done while the body is working to fix itself. The stem cells are triggered to become the appropriate cells to conduct repairs, which is generally a lot faster than waiting for the body to generate new cells on its own.
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