I've chafed considerably under the popular sentiment that opposing embryonic stem-cell research is  somehow synonymous with a Luddite, anti-future mentality.  No, it's not.  If there is a key problem that we've seen in the last century, it is that our ability to do things has outstripped our willingness to thoroughly examine the possible consequences.  One of my favorite sci-fi books of all time centers on this warning - Walter M. Miller Jr.'s classic, A Canticle for Leibowitz.   This is one of my top choices of books-I-pray-that-somebody-talented-makes-into-a-great-movie-someday.  

But it won't likely be any time soon, since the general tone and message of the book - a cautionary tale against a post-apocalyptic humanity that gradually rebuilds itself while making the same fatal errors as it's pre-apocalyptic forefathers - are now written off as being anti-science.  For Miller - and for Christians - the issue is not whether or not to do science, but how to do science in a way that lives out our profession of faith that we are creatures of a Creator, and that there are therefore lines that are not ours to cross.  Crossing them invariably leads to very dangerous situations, and as flawed creatures, we more often than not make very bad decisions in those dangerous situations.  Time and thought and a public forum should be part and parcel of science and research.  But they aren't.  

I like science.  It's fun and interesting and very helpful.  I know that my life is immeasurably better in many ways I take for granted so thoroughly that I can't even name them - all because of science.  But this doesn't mean I'm a moron.  Science is not amoral - not at the practical level of R&D.  Science is not an isolated arena, an ivory tower pursuit freed of the petty influences and controls that the rest of us deal with throughout our lives.  Science is funded.  If there's one thing that a scientist will tell you, it's that there isn't enough funding for science.  Whatever funding there is comes from places.  Private corporations with particular goals and intents for the research.  Governments.  Curious individuals.  And all of these sources have hopes and dreams and plans.  Some of them wonderful and loving.  Some perhaps not so wonderful and loving.  

They pay for science and research to occur.  And when it does, they control the results of that research, and most often the applications of science.  Therefore, to raise moral and ethical concerns about the type of science being pursued is not only healthy, it's absolutely necessary.  Because the scientists themselves are not always at liberty to raise those objections.  Their grants and endowments and livelihood depend not on what they want to do, so much as what they are paid to do.