I'm going to talk about the stem cell research. An important and actual theme, which raises many questions, like should we decide over life or death or are we allowed to create a human? But in my presentation I will not answer these questions, because in my opinion everyone must answer them by himself. The points I will be talking about are:
1. First: What is stem cell research?
2. Secondly: What are stem cells?
3. And finally: Why is stem cell research controversial?
1.Let's start with the first Question: What is stem cell research?
Generally you could say scientist separate some cells and manipulate them to become a specific cell, which could be used as a kind of medicine. For example you are losing nerve cells because of Alzheimer. Then they can implant you those stem cells which reproduce nerve cells to heal your Alzheimer. To illustrate how helpful this researches could be I will show you some possible applications of stem cell research:(Hier zeige ich eine Grafik) And these are just a few examples of the benefits of stem cell research.
But for all these things you need stem cells and therefore to the second point:
2.What are stem cells?
They are unspecialized cells with the property that they can replicate themselves over and over for a very long time. But there is not only one type of stem cells. They are divided in to two different types of Stem cells:
The embryonic stem cells and the adult stem cells. Each of them has pros and cons for the researches. To illustrate that I will list these properties in a chart.(hier zeige ich eine Tabelle und spreche frei darüber)
Finally, there is another big difference: Adult stem cells can be derived from an adult or an child but embryonic stem cells can only be derived from human embryos, who are destroyed after this process. And because of that stem cell research is high controversial. To expand on this problem I listed the most asked questions in reference to this debate : Could anyone read it?
• Does life begin at fertilization, in the womb, or at birth?
• Is a human embryo equivalent to a human child?
• Does a human embryo have any rights?
• Might the destruction of a single embryo be justified if it provides a cure for a countless number of patients?
• Since ES cells can grow indefinitely in a dish and can, in theory, still grow into a human being, is the embryo really destroyed?
• Is it too risky that someone in the future might “play god” and create a human?
• If they use only embryonic stem cells, which would otherwise be destroyed. Is it then ok?
To sum up my presentation very briefly we can say that stem cell research has a very high potential to save lives and make life for many people more livable but it also brings a lot of risks and conflicts.
Ich wäre für eine Korrektur sehr dankbar