Page 3 32

In Genesis, God breathes into a lump of clay to form the first man, Adam is page 3 22 Thus, life is seen as beginning when organs, particularly the lungs, develop, since it is then that the vital spirit arrives is page 3 22 The Talmud states that before 40 days, what is in the uterus is akin to water, not a human being is page 3 22 DeLay would do well to return to the Bible, because rabbis and imams who read it as their source of inspiration would not concur that Abraham's life and Muhammad's life were defined some seven to eight days after their conception, the time when researchers take stem cells from the blastocyst. The president drew his line in the sand back in 2001 when he decreed that federal funds could be used only for research on stem cell lines that already existed. His rationale was that the embryos that yielded those lines had already been destroyed but he did not want to encourage any more destruction, even if the embryos came from fertility clinics' surplus stocks that were ultimately to be discarded. Unfortunately, only about 20 lines have become available under his policy, and most suffer from technical and contamination problems that make them unsuitable for certain kinds of research. Scientists want access to more surplus embryos and the ability to create embryos from scratch in the laboratory, ideally with federal financing. In the Gospels Jesus does not directly speak to when the soul enters the flesh. So, certain Christian theologians have taken the words of the Prophet Jeremiah as a proof text about when life begins. "I knew you before you were formed in the womb," Jeremiah says, speaking in God's voice. The Vatican and several fundamentalist Protestant groups interpret this to signify that the soul is inserted at the moment of conception. The bill just passed by the House would ease the problem by allowing federal money to support research on a much wider array of stem cells derived from embryos that would otherwise be discarded.

page 3 25

page 3 12

Stem Cells Theology