Blog #5

For this blog, I read an article from the New York Times called "How India Reconciles Hindu Values and Biotech" about how religious values interfere with political and economical decisions in Japan, India, and the United States. The topic at hand is stem cell research-- a research which would make it possible to clone organs and body parts, and even humans and animals. Personally, I think that this could potentially have a lot of benefits and open numerable doors in the medical world. My religious beliefs do not contradict this process, but even if they did I think that the benefits would outweigh it and I would still support it. It could save many lives and could be very beneficial to people who need it, so that justifies it in my mind. In the article it discusses how religion interferes with this research. In 2001 president Bush restriced research on it which is partly due to the large portion of republican evangelical christians who are strongly opposed to it. Along with some forms of Hinduism, they believe that an embryo is a person and so you are killing someone by cloning an embryo. I think that religion should be disregarded from political decisions such as these because not all people share the same beliefs.

Mishra, Pankaj. "How India Reconciles Hindu Values and Biotech". New York Times. 21 Aug 2005. 15 Feb 2009.