New Stem Cell Creation Technique Inspiring More Division Along with Hope

The United States is losing its leading edge in biotech research, and will have to give up its position as "number one" in the near future, although the nation will continue to exert a strong influence in the field.

This is all due to ideology.

In November of this year, two scientists, including cutting-edge stem cell therapy pioneer Jamie Thompson of the University of Wisconsin at Madison, independently came up with a way to coax mature human skin cells into becoming, for all intents and purposes, stem cells.

"Over time, they will [be refined into being] virtually the same as stem cells," says Thompson.

This dual discovery has re-ignited the debate over the morals lying behind stem cell research in the Western world.

But in Asia, biotech is not summarily rejected, and a Creator of All does not get in the way of biotechnology's progress. In Asia, things such as stem cell research and even human cloning accord with Hinduism and Buddhism, which are religions that promote reincarnation. The West's often divisive debate does not have much of an audience there.

Ironically, biotechnology breakthroughs are mostly formulated in the Western world.

As a result, stem cell research has been embraced in Asia, whereas it is fought against to a great extent in the West, where people, including policy makers, generally fear the "brave new world" of a godless, and morally and emotionally hollow, society overseen by "world controllers".

Many Western stem cell researchers have migrated to Asia to carry out their research as a result.

The concept of the brave new world holds genetic manipulation of humans in the embryonic stage as a central precept of its workings.

Similarly, abortion is not the divisive issue in the East as it is in the West because, in the Oriental mind, no matter what happens on earth to a human body or potential human body, that body's spiritual essence cannot be destroyed and will just find another place and time to incarnate.

According to an interviewee named John, who is an American Christian, it is absurd for people to be totally opposed to all abortion based on the idea of God's will because an adult human woman who is not pregnant "aborts" a human egg approximately every 28 days, and this is the natural way of things that God created.

In 2000, Lee Silver, biotech researcher and molecular biologist at Princeton University, the author of the books Challenging Nature and Remaking Eden, packed up his family and essentially back-packed across the world, especially Asia.

Silver was inspired by the fact that he had previously been told he was not in touch with how people feel due to his backing of molecular biological research and related treatments.

He is a Jew who did not realize how Eastern people felt and thought about ethical matters or scientific matters.

He was amazed to discover open-hearted people who, unlike in the U.S., were generally straightforward about their thinking.

Silver's new perspectives that the Eastern travels inspired in him are significant, as he calls himself more than ever a "consequentialist" to whom the outcome, if it is a good, ethical one, is more important than the process.

He is more than ever an opponent of all opposition in the West to intervention in the natural processes of life and the universe. Silver believes that "human nature" will remake all of "mother nature" in the image of the "Ideal".

Silver is displeased with the displacement of "God" into Mother Nature, which causes people to idolize all that is "all-natural". Silver says that if people visited jungles they would see that just because something is "all-natural" does not necessarily make it good for either people or the planet.

No such thing in the East as "Creationism" exists because of the ubiquitous idea of the evolution of spirits, which they believe all human beings to be but which they can also see in such things as the cells of a Petri dish.

But in the West, the reliance upon a literal Christianity negates all such views, as there is a need for "special creation". Echoing actress Sally Field's saying in her pharmaceutical commercials, "I've got this one body; this one life."

Secularists accept the "one body, one life" precept, but they allow themselves to fall in love with nature instead of a supernatural-based religion. Nature very often replaces the Creator of All for those who give up on Christianity or Judaism in the West. However, this is seen by critics as a replacement that still maintains a monotheistic concept.

It is a notable parallel that while robotics and artificial intelligence are pioneered in the West, they are being taken to the next level by and large in the East, because in that region of the world the people do not fear the takeover of the machines. AIs and robots are seen as simply one more example of sentience, and Asian AI researchers see no reason to fear a "rise of the machines" who decide to enslave or annihilate their "lesser" human creators.