Franken Cells

I just read a very interesting article in Slate about the ongoing stem cell debate. Here’s an excerpt:

The second proposal, presented by council member William Hurlbut, is exactly the opposite. It’s brilliantly, grotesquely unconventional. Hurlbut, an earnest young member of the council’s conservative wing, has been working for two years on a scheme to end-run the problem of killing embryos. He seems to be the only person in this debate who has figured out that the Catholic fixation on the technical definition of a human embryo, which stem-cell researchers regard as a roadblock, actually presents an opportunity. Instead of whining about the church’s insistence on the continuity of personhood from embryo to adult, Hurlbut has seized on the point of discontinuity: the non-personhood of anything before or less than an embryo. If it isn’t an embryo, it’s fair game…