by 
Cate22
ANSWERS: 2
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How they are acquired. Initially the only way to get stem cells was from an aborted fetus... So this upset the pro-life people to no end and raised all sorts of ethical debates on whether they were killing babies for science. Now they can do it through a form of cloning, which of course raises a whole new set of ethical issues about cloning human cells. Most recently I seem to remember that they found a pretty non-controversial method of extracting them via a biopsy w/o having to kill/clone anything. I'd have to look up the specifics on it though. This debate is of course only on the human research branch of stem cells. Most people don't get so worked up about the stem cell research done on rats for instance.
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I think there was something not too long ago about being able to use stem-cells to produce new brain cells when befroe it was assumed that new brain cells were impossible to create.
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