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Monitoring Stem Cell Research 
The claim that there is a perfect contingency in the relationship 
between embryo and person may at first appear to be just another 
"microscopic" claim about embryo status, but it is clear that Waldby 
and Squier mean to imply much more in asserting that the embryo’s 
development is non-teleological. In effect, they reject the notion that 
there is a meaningful trajectory to human life. What was killed, they 
say, when stem cells were first derived from the inner cell mass of a 
blastocyte was not a person, but a "biographical idea of human life, 
where the narrative arc that describes identity across time has been 
extended to include the earliest moments of ontogeny" (Waldby and 
Squier, forthcoming). 
That much more is at stake here than the question of whether 
the embryo is a person is clear if we attend to the notion of a 
trajectory of a human life. Gilbert Meilaender, for example, has 
argued that our attitudes toward death and dying are importantly 
shaped by our conception of what it means to have a life (Meilaender 
1993). Indeed, according to Meilaender, two views of what it means 
to have a life of what it means to be a person have been at war with 
each other within the field of bioethics over the past thirty years and 
these views underwrite sharply different views not just about the 
issues of abortion or euthanasia that are implicated here but with 
regard to practically every moral issue we might confront in the field 
of bioethics. 
On Meilaender’ s view, having a life means precisely that there is 
a trajectory that traces a "natural pattern" in embodied life that 
“moves through youth and adulthood toward old age and, finally, 
decline and death" (29). As he puts it elsewhere in this essay, "to 
have a life is to be terra animate , a living body whose natural history 
has a trajectory” (31). Although Meilaender develops the notion of a 
natural trajectory of bodily life primarily to address the issue of 
euthanasia and not stem cell research, his talk of "natural history," 
“natural pattern," and “natural trajectory" draws attention to one of 
the most significant issues raised by stem cell research and related 
technologies. Does stem cell research undermine the very notion of a 
human life constrained by natural bodily existence? The example on 
which Meilaender focuses here is instructive for thinking about the 
broad implications of stem cell research in this regsird. If stem cell 
therapies fundamentally alter our sense of a natural pattern to aging 
would they not also fundamentally alter our sense of what it means 
to be human? Meilaender’ s answer is that such a change would 
fundamentally affect what it means to be human precisely because 
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