When is life considered life?  More specifically … when does human life begin?

This is a subject that we hear debated in government halls, religious circles and respectable newspapers … but never can we find the common ground to say “This is when life is life, and this is the stage where we protect it.”  I don’t claim to have an answer, as this is a very loaded question, but I do have a question back to everyone that believes that life starts at the time of conception and we should protect it as the barely-multi-celled organism has the same rights as us; “What makes this life so important?”

Whenever I hear this argument I strain to listen in order to hear what insight some new minds might bring to the table.  This is a very touchy subject for many as humans have an inalienable claim to certain rights.  These rights include protection from exploitation and the right to food, water and shelter.

So this brings me to the subject at hand … the Human Paradox.

A group of scientists in the UK have applied for permission to inject human genetic material into cow eggs that are devoid of their own genetic material.  The end goal of this action is to create a steady supply of human stem cells with which to examine the onset of certain diseases.  This gets around the current bottleneck of using human eggs supplied by women, which is not realistically feasible as a long term supplier of this material.

Ten years ago, a team lead by Jose Cibelli was successful with their attempt to fool the cow egg into thinking it’s pregnant so that it will begin the cell division process using human genetic material as the blueprint for reproduction.  However, this event was condemned as unethical by President Bill Clinton and opened the monumental question “When is life, life?”

Unfortunately, after a decade of heated debate, we’re no closer today than when the question was first asked.

The idea here is to inject DNA from people afflicted with Alzheimers, Parkinson’s and a plethora of other diseases into these devoid cow eggs.  From here, the eggs would be tricked into multiplying for a period of five days, where they will then be “killed” and the stem cells harvested.  With these cells, researchers could examine these diseases right at the very start of their development.  With this knowledge, scientists would have a much better understanding of the root causes of these diseases and could begin working on viable methods of repair.

“Exciting” does not even begin to describe this field of science.  The potential rewards for research in this area includes the abolishment of diseases and conditions that cause considerable pain.  This would be as important to medical science as the discovery of pennicilin.

But at the same time this means we humans would be, in effect, playing God.  We would be creating inter-species life that should not have existed for the sole purpose of killing it, extracting what we want from it, then discarding the rest.  Heck, this could be viewed as rape on a cellular level followed by an immediate abortion.  I can certianly understand why so many people are offended by the mere thought of scientists playing with the very foundation of life.

But is a cellular organism only five days old human?  What makes us human?  Is it the amount of time that we spend in the womb?  Is it our ability to speak and reason?  Is it our mostly hairless bodies with two arms, two legs, and all the other features that make up our person?  Is this a question to be answered philosophically, or politically?

As it stands, we humans turn a blind eye to the millions in distress all over the planet.  We ignore the homeless.  We ignore the unfortunate people in war-torn nations.  We ignore the attrocities in Darfur.  We ignored the heinous crimes that happened in Sierra Leone.  We pay little attention to the countless children forced into the sex trade industry….  The list goes on and on.

And this is just for crimes against other humans!  I can dedicate half a Wiki to the bullshit we do to animals, and another for our crimes against the Earth.

So why does a clump of non-sentient, semi-functional, cross-species animal cells warrant so much of our attention?  Is it because we’re not ready yet as a species to play God?  Or is it because we’ve messed up everything else so bad that we want to protect the last frontier we’ve yet to exploit and bastardise?