No? Look at the patently rediculous answer you got from 9sublime. I note that you made no attempt to steer him in the direction you intended.
And the man who made the quote was making a weak attempt to justify the continued killing of human embryo's, not simply point out that there are ethical problems.
I don't usually steer people in a debate but perhaps I am guilty of not giving enough information.
The man who made the quote was not attempting to justify the killing of human embryo's but rather, was someone seriously wrestling with the ethical considerations of killing human embyros to provide potential life saving treatments: a potential person vs. a potential treatment. He didn't regard it lightly and the fact that he may not have agreed with
you does not cheapen his ethics. The dilemma involved is one we are going to be facing over and over again in this world of rapidly advancing science - an advance far more rapid then the corresponding advance in ethics. To attempt to cheapen it as a "weak attempt to justify the continued killing of human embryos" is just that - cheap. The dilemma is real. Science is neutral. It's how people develop the associated ethics that puts a value on it.
Here is an article, that talks about Thompson:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/special/whitewater/docs/fosterx.htm
Reserved Scientist Creates an Uproar With His Work on Stem Cells
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG
When Jonas Salk discovered the polio vaccine, he granted the journalist Edward R. Murrow an interview, appeared in a photo spread in Life magazine, and became an American hero virtually overnight. When Dolly the sheep was cloned, her creator, Ian Wilmut, was featured in news magazines and on television programs around the globe.
Few people, by contrast, have ever heard of James A. Thomson. And that is just the way Dr. Thomson likes it.
Three years ago, Dr. Thomson, a developmental biologist at the University of Wisconsin, became the first person to isolate stem cells from human embryos. Nobel laureates praised his work as a breakthrough that might revolutionize modern medicine. Conservatives and some religious leaders, notably Pope John Paul II, denounced it as immoral.
Now President Bush is considering whether to permit federal financing for the research; current law bans spending taxpayer dollars on such work. And here in Wisconsin, where a private foundation affiliated with the university holds the lucrative patent rights to the cells Dr. Thomson discovered, some legislators are contemplating a ban on future embryonic stem cell work.
At the vortex of the controversy is an intensely private, soft-spoken scientist who, by all accounts, including his own, has thought carefully about the ethical implications of his research, as well as the inevitable publicity. That he might wind up in the spotlight so worried Dr. Thomson, he said, that he almost decided not to pursue the work that, many scientists say, holds out the hope for curing diseases as varied as Parkinson's, Alzheimer's and diabetes.
But in the end, he said, with characteristic understatement, ''I just decided it would be important enough to do it.''
.......
''He has been fanatically attentive to the ethical issues,'' Dr. Fost said. ''We are lucky that the guy who is the pioneer in all this is such a responsible, thoughtful person.''
For Dr. Thomson, the moral questions about embryo experimentation were not difficult to resolve; he concluded that research was the ''better ethical choice,'' so long as the embryos, created by couples who no longer wanted to use them to have children, would otherwise be discarded.
But he was worried that stem cells might be misused to clone people -- a fear that, he said, eventually abated in 1997, when Dr. Wilmut demonstrated by cloning Dolly that embryos were not needed because clones could be produced from adult cells. And he did not like the idea that he might become a public person. So he contemplated leaving to someone else the research in human embryos.
The ethical dilemma represented is in my mind: do you save the many potential people or do you save the one actualized person? All are human beings.
I have my answer and my reasons which in the end are the same reason that if it were a choice between the mother's life and the fetus' - I would choose the mother.