The Human Rights Debate

A large portion of that turbulence stems from there appears no method of synthetically producing these cells, therefore they need to be harvested from a living organism.  This is where human embryos became the focus of scientists attention and pro-life human rights activists in turn raising some serious debates about the social, political, legal, ethical and moral implications surrounding the research as we are destroying a human life in order to potentially save others.

One of the more publicly debated questions is at what point does anything containing human DNA become classified as human or potentially human and therefore covered under international human rights laws such as the right to life? This particular debate also extends to DNA samples, cancerous growths and should go even as far as bodies donated to science as they all contain human DNA.  As you can see, that argument is flawed because to claim something is human purely because of its genetic makeup can be interpreted in a number of ways with the ability to argue both for and against the research on all points raised.