Significant advances in the treatment of several debilitating medical conditions such as "Parkinson's and Alzheimer's diseases, spinal cord injury, stroke, burns, heart disease, diabetes," and many more are within the grasp of United States scientific community (National Institutes of Health (NIH), Basics VI). These advances come through the use of stem cells, which have already been used to treat leukemia, lymphoma, diabetes, and advanced kidney disease (NIH, Backgrounder). Even with all these benefits, research on embryonic stem (abbreviated ES) cells has incited much debate over the morality of the legislation that allows them to be used. Martin Luther King, Junior offers some guidance on which ES cell laws are morally upright in "Letter from Birmingham Jail" when he defines a just law as "a man-made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God Any law that uplifts human personality is just" (334). With a basic understanding of how stem cells function, it is evident that research on embryonic stem cells holds the greatest potential for enabling the development of new medical treatments, and while America has made some progress in providing federal funding for embryonic stem cell research, it deserves the funding that would be afforded by passing a morally upright bill titled "The Stem Cell Act of 2001.".
To be able to understand the potential benefits of stem cells, it is necessary to have at least a basic understanding of what stem cells are and some of the terms used to define them. A stem cell is a cell from the embryo or adult that has the ability to reproduce itself for long periods by cell division (NIH, Basics II). The second requirement for a cell to be considered a stem cell is that it has no specific purpose until it receives a signal to become a more specialized cell (NIH, Basics II). This process of a stem cell becoming a specialized cell is referred to as differentiation (NIH, Basics VIII).
