Catholic Fire

It’s on the lips and in the thoughts of most Kansans these days. Our parish adult education guest speaker Catholic Dave Gittrich , the President of Kansans for Life, gave us a basic introduction on stem cell research this past week, which I will briefly summarize in simple terms here, with the help of my notes from that talk, along with some of American Life League’s definitions, and excerpts from A Pastoral Letter from the Bishops of Kansas . The Basics What is a stem cell? Stem cells are unspecialized cells. One of the fundamental properties of a stem cell is that it does not have any tissue-specific structures that allow it to perform specialized functions. For example, a stem cell cannot work with its neighbors to pump blood through the body like a heart cell. Stem cells are very simple, primitive human cells. However, when stem cells divide, they can form a variety of more specialized cells. When unspecialized stem cells give rise to specialized cells, the process is called diff...