To grow life to destroy it

Even if I were a strict vegetarian, some of the rhetoric being flung around the stem cell debate would still give me pause.

Quoted on NPR yesterday, stem-cell research opponent: "We can't grow life only to destroy it."

What? Where stop the squeamies so that murder doesn't tweak on a conscience? We grow life all the time with the sole purpose of destroying it. Entire industries and economies predicate themselves on growing and killing life. Meat packing plants. Corn silos. The freezer aisle offers both animal and plant life generated only to be killed.

And not just killed: eaten.

Perhaps the morality becomes a question in a science lab with just one cell at a time. Isn't one of the first tenets of 4H not to name your livestock? Perhaps we're afraid scientists are too familiar with the individual cells. I didn't think individual cells were complicated enough to identify provenience.

On the other hand, we, as a society, seem to think nothing of growing chickens in boxes to spec then killing them.

When a stem-cell someone tells me that we're growing fibroblasts out of humans cells to augment the protein content of my dinner, then I'll have a snark and get really upset.

I smell a faint reek of hypocrisy. Was that last night's dinner left out too long?