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Biology and medicine are two fascinating areas of research, but they also raise important ethical questions.

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Some of the most difficult and interesting ethical issues raised by biomedicine are those that are linked with assisted reproduction, stem cells, cloning and eugenics.

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Assisted reproduction has helped many infertile couples to have children, but it has also produced a lot of spare fertilised eggs.

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In order to improve the chances of a pregnancy, a lot of eggs are fertilised in an assisted reproduction process.

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Those which are not used are stored, frozen, and nobody knows what to do with them.

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The problem is that these eggs can potentially develop and create a human being.

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So what should we do with them? Is it correct to destroy them? Is it correct to use them in order to do scientific research?

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Is it correct to keep them frozen, stored in a building, forever?

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So that's a difficult and tricky ethical debate.

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Stem cells are cells that are found in embryos and that can transform into different types of cells.

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For example, muscle cells or nerve cells.

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So they are very useful and scientists are very interested in getting to know more about them

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because they could potentially be used to produce different tissues and eventually create organs that can be used to cure diseases.

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The problem is that these stem cells that come from embryos produce a debate, an ethical debate.

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Is it morally correct to use an embryo to take stem cells from them and later use these cells to cure another person?

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The problem comes because the embryo can potentially be transformed into a person.

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So if we destroy the embryo to use the stem cells, we are stopping this natural development that makes the embryo into a person.

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Nevertheless, today scientists can also produce stem cells with different ways, not using embryos, so that can be somehow solved.

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Cloning is a technique that is used to reproduce exact copies of an organism.

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Cloning has been used to produce identical copies of animals like the famous dolly sheep.

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Some people fear that if we continue our research with cloning, scientists might eventually produce human clones.

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Creating an identical copy of a human being raises tremendous ethical issues.

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Some people are very afraid of this and they think that human cloning should be totally forbidden.

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Nevertheless, some scientists think that cloning can also be used to produce organs and tissues that could help us to cure diseases that today cannot be treated.

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So they talk about therapeutic cloning.

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Therapeutic cloning is different to human cloning because the idea in therapeutic cloning is to use cloning techniques to cure diseases, not to create copies of human beings.

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And it's important that you make this difference and you understand it properly.

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Finally, let's talk about eugenics.

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Eugenics is a technique used to select organisms in order to improve the species.

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So the basic idea consists in encouraging the reproduction of some organisms that are considered superior and to make difficult or stop the reproduction of organisms that are called inferior in order to improve the race.

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This is exactly what the Nazis did.

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The Nazis used these two types of eugenics, what we call positive and negative eugenics.

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Positive eugenics means encouraging people, in this case, that were considered genetically superior or racially superior to have a lot of children.

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And negative eugenics is about making as much as possible to stop people who were considered inferior from reproducing.

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As you know, what the Nazis did was to kill a lot of people that were considered racially inferior and also to sterilize people they didn't want to reproduce.

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For example, people that were mentally ill.

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Of course, today we think about these practices as highly unethical, immoral and unacceptable because they violate human rights.

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Nevertheless, some people are afraid that a new type of eugenics might develop in the future.

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For example, if we develop genetic engineering and in the future it's possible to decide the traits of your children.

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Imagine that in a few decades, biomedicine has developed so much that we can offer our parents to create children with the traits, the characteristics that they prefer.

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This could be done selecting the embryos, selecting the engineering that can make them, for example, tall or blonde or intelligent or with blue eyes.

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What kind of world would we live in if this was possible?

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There would be some children that have been selected or designed by their parents, while there would be other children that were born like you and me.

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So wouldn't it be a world where naturally born children would be discriminated?

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It would probably lead to a society that is hierarchically divided into superior people, so people that were engineered, and inferior people, people that were born naturally.

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So a lot of people are scared about that and they think cloning should be also regulated and some practices forbidden in order to stop the darkest side of this kind of research.