Monitoring Stem Cell Research 
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embryos and the permissibility of embryo research more gen- 
erally. 
V. SOCIETAL SIGNIFICANCE AND 
PUBLIC RESPONSIBILITY 
While the bulk of the public debate surrounding embryonic 
stem cell research has been directed to the question of the 
moral standing of human embryos, some commentators have 
raised a number of other crucial and serious concerns. They 
have argued that the debate suffers from focusing too narrowly 
on questions of the standing of human embryos, when other 
issues — including the duties and responsibilities of those who 
engage in embryonic stem cell research, the implications of 
such uses of nascent life for our society (rather than just for the 
embryos themselves), the significance of the public debate, 
and a series of other issues — also bear heavily on the subject, 
and may illuminate it in ways at least as significant. 
Some authors, including some who do not believe that hu- 
man embryos should simply be treated as inviolable persons, 
have argued that the instrumentalization of human embryos — 
the seeds of the next generation — ^might tend to coarsen the 
sensibilities of our society toward future generations, and to- 
ward human life in general, quite apart from the effects on the 
embryos themselves. Others also argue that by setting down 
the path laid out by human embryonic stem cell research, we 
open the way for other, and more troubling, techniques and 
developments. Since human suffering and disease will never 
come to an end, they suggest, the resort to extreme and poten- 
tially exploitative methods is unlikely to find a logical stopping 
point. Today, they argue, scientists want to use only the earli- 
est embryos; but what will happen when it turns out that 
later-stage embryos are even more valuable in developing 
treatments for disease?^"*® 
Critics of this view have generally argued that it fails to of- 
fer a sufficient groimd for impeding the promise and potential 
of medical treatments that might result from embryonic stem 
cell work. These critics see medical research as a central moral 
duty, and they argue that a society that prevents such re- 
PRE -PUBLICATION VERSION 
