There is a useful tactic employed when a fact will destroy a strongly supported argument. You simply don't reveal the fact to the person you are trying to persuade to agree with you. Get enough people persuaded to join you by this deception and you will have a group backing your cause. Even more, you will build up a body of myths to support your claims with a chorus of supporters repeating them enough that even more people will succumb to uncertainty and peer pressure and start to believe that perhaps your opinion has some validity to it.

This tactic is being used by a number of groups to advance their agendas. Also known as a lie by omission, it can deceive even a well-educated, well-meaning individual into espousing destructive public policies that previous generations who knew the fact and the reasoning associated with it would never have sanctioned.

I saw an example of it in a news story about how embryonic stem cells have been used to heal rats with spinal cord injuries. It ignored the fact that adult stem cells had already been successfully used to treat the same injuries. Further, it ignored the fact that the cure with adult stem cells could use cells from the patient and thus avoid the problem of rejection from using incompatible embryonic stem cells. It made it sound like this was the first major breakthrough in a cure for this medical problem.

I heard the arguments from advocates of embryonic stem cell research on some radio talk shows following the news broadcast of this story. The people were are all aglow about the prospects of healing spinal cord and other nerve damage with the technique. They brushed aside the facts about proven adult stem cell cures. One individual kept stressing that the embryos were just little balls of cells about the size of a period and thus weren't really human. Despite the host's attempts to enlighten him that this little ball of cells had human genes and really was a tiny human being, the caller kept acting like the host and his audience just had to be educated on the benefits of embryonic stem cell research and how the little ball of cells was nothing but a blob which could be used any way a doctor thought best to cure an adult or child patient.

This refusal to accept the scientific facts about the inherent humanity of the embryo has resulted in the "education" of many otherwise knowledgeable individuals in the myths that support research which has had far more problems and far fewer successes than the research on adult stem cells. The caller seemed comfortably convinced that the little ball of cells couldn't possibly have anything in it that could harm the individual who would receive the transplanted cells taken from it. He sounded like he thought it was some sort of jelly that could somehow develop genes later but didn't really have anything like that when the stem cells were extracted from it.

That is absolute nonsense. A fertilized egg has the full set of chromosomes for that human being. Every cell created from that point on also has the full set of chromosomes as well. It takes a few days to a few weeks for the stem cells to differentiate into the different kinds of cells that make the various organs or other structures in the body, but the chromosomes are always there. It is a matter of controlling which ones are needed to make the particular tissue in question.

Thus, an embryonic stem cell has the genetic code of the human body that is created from cells multiplying from it. It has the same potential of causing a transplant rejection as any tissue transplant from the adult body would. Tissues derived from embryonic stem cells are basically organ or tissue transplants from a corpse; and just as adult donors and recipients must be carefully matched to ensure a reasonable chance of success for a patient and the transplant to survive compatibly, it would be necessary to carefully match any tissues derived from an embryonic stem cell to the prospective patient for the technique to succeed.

That is one of the reasons that researchers want to create more embryonic stem cell lines. What works in a highly inbred strain of rats (whose genetic variability has been deliberately minimized to tailor it to a specific purpose) may not be so easy to do in a more highly variable species like human beings. Even at the embryonic stage, a human being's tissue can cause the same transplant rejection problems. It is not a neutral blob of jelly free for the taking if the parents who donated the egg and sperm to produce the embryo consent.

Thus the destroyed embryos still exert their human individuality despite the best medical manipulation of the cells or the best political manipulation of the medical facts about their innate humanity. We are only fooling ourselves if we think that using embryonic stem cells will give us the medical breakthroughs we seek without paying an unacceptable price in human destruction. Adult stem cells from adult donors or cord blood can yield the same cures without murdering a fellow human being.