For the last 40 years, the “14-day rule” has served as an international guideline in embryonic research. That is the point in which an embryo starts to form a body plan. Under that rule, scientists made a political decision to never allow human embryos to go beyond that as a sort of promise to the public that they would not attempt to grow babies in labs.
It seems that now, though, The International Society for Stem Cell Research is ready to do away with that standard. They are currently drafting recommendations to ease those restrictions to allow expanded research. It seems that new scientific techniques are expanding the possibilities – particularly as it relates to scientists’ ability to create human-animal chimeras (organisms composed of cells from more than one type of animal).
The people who are promoting this expansion are scientists who hold a naturalistic worldview. Naturalism is the belief that the natural universe, operating by natural laws, is all that exists. These people have very little concern with ethics because their naturalistic worldview assumes that there is no real distinction between humans and other animals. They believe that all life forms have naturally evolved based on the evolutionary principle of descent with modification. Based on their point of view, crossing of the boundary between human and animal cannot be “immoral” because crossing the species lines happens in nature all the time. They see absolutely no fixed differences or breaks between animals and humans.
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