"When I saw the embryo, I suddenly realized there was such a small difference between it and my daughters."
This quote comes not by way of some right-wing, science-hating Christian fundamentalist, but from Shinya Yamanaka -- a professor at the Institute for Integrated Cell-Material Sciences at Japan's Kyoto University, and developer of the most promising innovation in stem-cell research to date.
According to this piece in the New York Times, when Dr. Yamanaka first looked through a microscope at a fertility clinic, the plain reality of science gave him an epiphany: “I thought, we can’t keep destroying embryos for our research. There must be another way.”
Thank you, Dr. Yamanaka, for a much-needed reminder: Good science begets good ethics -- and vice versa.
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