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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 fertilized eggs.

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In order to improve the chances of a pregnancy, a lot of eggs are fertilized 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?

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Is it correct to destroy them?

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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

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of cells, 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

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them because they could potentially be used to produce different tissues and eventually

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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

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debate.

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Is it more correct to use an embryo to take stem cells from them and later use these cells

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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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if we destroy the embryo to use the stem cells we are stopping this natural

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development that makes the embryo into a person nevertheless today scientists can

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also produce stem cells with different ways not using embryos so that can be

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somehow soft cloning is a technique that is used to reproduce exact copies of an

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organism cloning has been used to produce identical copies of animals like

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the famous Dolly ship and some people fear that if we continue our research

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with cloning scientists might eventually produce human clones creating an

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identical copy of a human being raises tremendous ethical issues it is a big

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big problem so some people are very afraid of this and they thought they think that a cloning

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human cloning should be totally forbidden nevertheless some scientists think that cloning

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can also be used to produce organs and tissues that could help us to cure diseases that today

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cannot be treated so they talk about therapeutic cloning therapeutic cloning

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is different to human cloning because the idea in therapeutic cloning is to

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use cloning techniques to cure diseases not to create copies of human beings and

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it's important that you make this difference and you understand it

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properly finally let's talk about eugenics eugenics is a technique used to

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select organisms in order to improve this species so the basic idea consists

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in encouraging the reproduction of some organisms that are considered superior

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and to make difficult or stop the reproduction of organisms that are called inferior in order

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to improve the race. This is exactly what the Nazis did. The Nazis used these two types of

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eugenics, what we call positive and negative eugenics. Positive eugenics means encouraging

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encouraging people, in this case, that were considered genetically superior or racially

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superior to have a lot of children. And negative eugenics is about making as much as possible to

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stop people who were considered inferior from reproducing. As you know, what the Nazis did

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was to kill a lot of people that were considered racially inferior and also to sterilize people

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they didn't want to reproduce for example people that were mentally ill of

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course today we think about these practices as highly unethical immoral

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and unacceptable because they violate human rights nevertheless some people

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are afraid that a new type of eugenics might develop in the future for example

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if we develop genetic engineering and in the future is possible to decide the

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traits of your children imagine that in a few decades biomedicine has developed

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so much that we can offer our parents to create children with their traits the

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characteristics that they prefer this could be done selecting the embryos

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selecting the engineering that can make them for example tall or blonde or

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intelligent or with blue eyes. What kind of world would we live in if this was

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possible? There would be some children that have been selected or designed by

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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

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discriminated it would probably lead to a society that is hierarchically divided

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into superior people so people that were engineered and inferior people people

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that were born naturally so a lot of people are scared about that and they

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think cloning should be also regulated and some practices forbidden in order to

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stop the darkest side of this kind of research.