Health Care

When you receive the Seal you will begin to understand the value of human life since you will have new Life. When you understand the value of life you will see just how precious the new stem cell discoveries are.

The year 2007 was a remarkable year for science since it was the year ordinary skin cells were "reprogrammed" into stem cells which acted just like embryonic stem cells, but without killing a living embryo.

Regardless of what happens before fertilization, it is the start of life. And when you become sealed you will discover how your life began even before fertilization and was predetermined from long ago.

But for an ordinary person fertilization is the beginning of life. So using fertilized embryos for science is really killing a very young life before it has a chance to grow into an elderly adult person.

But that is all over now. Because now ordinary cells have been turned into stem cells. A second study right on the heels of that first breakthrough successfully replaced diseased cells with healthy ones.

That was a study with mice that had sickle-cell disease injected into them. Ordinary and undiseased skin cells were taken from their tails and transformed into stem cells. They replaced the diseased cells in the body and the mice were healed of the disease.

That second breakthrough was also quite important and timely too. It showed the new technology could be used for the beneficial purposes of healing disease.

Now scientists are singing the praises of the new discoveries, and what they are saying reveals just how important they are. It is likened to alchemy, where lead was turned into gold.

Turning common substances into gold. That was something long searched for. And the discoveries are called the equivalent of the Wright brothers' airplane which was the first to fly. Another huge milestone for technology.

President Bush would not allow Federal funding of embryonic stem cell research. That was a good thing seen in hindsight in the light of these discoveries. It was one of the reasons scientists discovered reprogramming.

Cloning is a similar procedure to reprogramming cells into stem cells. But cloning is complicated and does require creation of an embryo, which makes it practically useless for healing disease in humans.

And organ transplants have saved lives, but there is always the danger that the organ will be rejected by the body. There is no such danger with stem cells--they are cells already from the same body so they will never be rejected.

Scientists have big dreams for stem cells. Now there are exceedingly abundant resources for scientists because there are as many sources of stem cells as there are people.

And scientists are excited about what they can discover about diseases with these stem cells. They can take skin cells easily from a person and grow tissue with those cells and then study them to find out about the genetic make-up of disease.

That is going to speed up cures that are a little slow in coming. And by growing tissue out of stem cells scientists can study the effects of drugs they are developing without needing to test on animals, avoiding another ethical problem.

But the most wonderful promise of the new technology is that no embryos need to be sacrificed to cure sick people or save lives. Scientists caution that they still need to study embryos as the "standard," but the first step has been taken.

When you are sealed you will understand how precious life is, because you will see how God has given you eternal Life. And you will also see how God chose you from before history to receive the Seal.