12 
Monitoring Stem Cell Research 
IV. TERMINOLOGY 
In considering complicated or contested public questions, 
language matters — even more than it ordinarily does. Clear 
thinking depends on clear ideas, and clear ideas can be con- 
veyed only through clear and precise speech. And fairness in 
ethical evaluation and judgment depends on fair framing of the 
ethical questions, which in turn requires fair and accurate de- 
scription of the relevant facts of the case at hand. Such consid- 
erations are highly pertinent to our topic and to the arguments 
it generates. 
Confounding the discussions of stem cell research, there 
are, to begin with, difficult technical concepts, referring to 
complicated biological entities and phenomena, that can cause 
confusion among all but the experts. Some of these concepts 
we will clarify in Chapter 4 and others are defined in the Glos- 
sary and, in some cases, illustrated in Appendix A on early 
embryonic development. But the more important terminologi- 
cal issues are those used to formulate the ethical and policy 
issues about which people so vigorously disagree. We pause 
to comment on three of them: “the embryo” (or "the human 
embryo”), “spare embryos,” and “the moral status of the em- 
bryo.” 
Strictly speaking, there is no such thing as “the embryo,” if 
by this is meant a distinctive being (or kind of being) that de- 
serves a common, reified name — like “dog” or “elephant.” 
Rather, the term properly intends a certain stage of develop- 
ment of an organism of a distinctive kind. Indeed, the very 
term comes from a Greek root meaning “to grow”: an embryo 
is, by its name and mode of being, an immature and growing 
organism in an early phase of its development.* The advent of 
in vitro fertilization, in which living human embryos from their 
first moments are encountered as independent entities outside 
the body of a mother, before human eyes and in human hands. 
* In classical embryology, “embryo” is the name given — somewhat arbitrar- 
ily — to the developing human organism from the time of fertilization until 
roughly eight weeks, the time that the first calcification of bone occurs. After 
that, the developing human organism is called a "fetus," equally a reified 
name for a dynamic entity, an entity-in-the-process-of-becoming-more-fuUy- 
the-kind-of-organism-it-already-is. 
PRE -PUBLICATION VERSION 
