President Obama Overturns Bush's Policy on Stem Cell Research

Today, President Barack Obama overturned Bush's policy on stem cell research. When I was driving my little sister to school this morning, I heard on the radio how President Obama was going to change this law that was made by Bush and I didn't even know what stem cell research was until today.

In my Biology of Human Reproduction class today, we talked about birth and the different stages an embryo goes through to get to the actual fetus stage. For those of you who have no idea what stem cell research is about or what it is for like I didn't know at first, I will give you a little background on this topic from what I learned today in class.

So, during reproduction and once the egg and sperm connect and the sperm attaches to the nucleus of the egg, cells are beginning to be made and to make a long story short there are 46 chromosomes after all the conjoining of the genetic cells from the sperm and the egg. All while this is happening, this ball of cells are moving through the fallopian tubes of the woman and will eventually make it to the uterus where it will attach and the development of the fetus occurs for 9 months.

Well during that process, this "ball" turns into an embryo before it turns into a fetus. The cells from the embryo is what scientists used for stem cell research before Bush stopped funding it. People thought that since this embryo has the potential of becoming a human that this certain research is killing life because once you take the embryo out of the woman's body, the embryo will die. So Bush stopped funding stem cell research.

Cells from embryos could turn into any kind of cells that was needed. For example, during stem cell research, before it was stopped, scientist found out that an embryo cell from a mouse could turn into a cell that can produce insulin. So this could cure people with type 1 diabetes who don't have the cells that produce insulin if scientists were able to research with human embryos.

Overall, stem cell research is very important and since President Obama has lifted that restriction, we may be hearing about advances in stem cell research in the near future.

GOTTA LOVE OUR PRESIDENT!