research and development.

Like we (and some other person, one time) once said, If you can make it here, you can make it anywhere — but not because of something as banal as “job opportunities.” It’s out of the sheer force of fucking will that brought you here when you could have had it easier somewhere else, where you would have driven a four-door sedan and shopped in suburban grocery stores with wide aisles and pristine parking lots and have had 2.5 children by the age of 28 and worked a 9-to-5 job in something [yawn] somewhere.

If you’re making it here, you can make it anywhere because you have the courage to do what you do every damn day, punctuated with the fleeting moments of beauty and pain that make it all worthwhile.

Let us look at the details. A three-day-old human embryo is a collection of 150 cells called a blastocyst. There are, for the sake of comparison, more than 100,000 cells in the brain of a fly. The human embryos that are destroyed in stem cell research do not have brains, or even neurons. Consequently, there is no reason to believe they can suffer their destruction in any way at all. It is worth remembering, in this context, that when a person’s brain has died, we currently deem it acceptable to harvest his organs (provided he has donated them for this purpose) and bury him in the ground. If it is acceptable to treat a person whose brain has died as something less than a human being, it should be acceptable to treat a blastocyst as such. If you are concerned about suffering in this universe, killing a fly should present you with greater moral difficulties than killing a human blastocyst. Sam Harris, from Letter to a Christian Nation.