Question: Do you have any personal opinion, about using stem cell from embryos?

Sharon Sneddon answered on 24 Mar 2011:

Hi Karine,

My personal beliefs on embryonic stem cells are that they are a good thing. I think that anything that has the potential to help people from suffering illnesses like cancer or diabetes or parkinsons disease should be researched thoroughly to try and help as many people.

Stem cells research raises a lot of ethical questions. Especially embryonic stem cells. Because we work with human eggs and embryos, these have the potential to become a human life so there are lots of things to think about before we carry out any experiments. We have to follow fules and regulations and ethics come into that, we work under a government body called the Human Embryology and Fertilisation Authority and they have lots of people working for them, from scientists, to doctors, to religious people to everyday people who are not scientists and they look at our exeriments and decide if we can carry them out. Once we have that permission, we then go to our University and hospital ethics committe to make sure they are happy with what we are doing.

I think having all these things in place makes us think really carefully about the ethics of our work.

All the work I do is very ethical and I am sure that stem cells are a great thing if used correctly.