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You're in a burning room with a wheelchair-bound adult and a freezer full of blastocysts. You can't save both the tiny embryos and the adult, so whom do you save?

I was asked this question by Hans S. Keirstead, an embryonic stem-cell researcher at the Reeve-Irvine Research Center in Southern California. He wanted to show that, when push comes to shove, all of us grade human life on a sliding scale. What he didn't realize was that he was talking to a woman who had once chosen the life of the embryo growing inside her over her own life as she had envisioned it.

Ever since speculation over the healing potential of human embryonic stem cells began circulating after scientists isolated them in 1998, I have wondered what I would do if scientists ever extracted a cure for my child's incurable disease from tiny human lives like the one I had cherished. I set out to find answers by talking to two stem-cell scientists about the ethics of their work. It was a remarkable entry into a world of half-truths, hesitancy, and awkward logic.

I couldn't suppress a slight smile when Dr. Keirstead met me outside his office barefoot and wearing frayed jeans. He is known, after all, as the hip, telegenic face of embryonic stem-cell (ESC) research. Keirstead catapulted out of obscurity when he and a colleague made paralyzed rats walk by injecting them with cells derived from human embryonic stem cells. For some time now, he has publicly contended that human trials will begin "next year," but he only recently published his findings, and other ESC scientists I spoke to were highly skeptical of this assertion. Keirstead was on the committee for Proposition 71—the initiative to spend $3 billion on ESC research in California—and his employer stands to benefit handsomely from his efforts.

When grappling with the idea of destroying human embryos to achieve his objective, this descendent of nine Baptist and Lutheran pastors (including both his father and grandfather) didn't reason from the Christian faith of his childhood or the other religions he studied in college. First, he identified the three-day-old blastocyst (the tiny embryo from which stem cells are extracted) as the point of ethical controversy. "It's true that if it is planted into a uterus that thing could make a child," he reflected. "So that's bad." Struggling with what value to place on "that thing," he determined that the real "wonder" is in the egg and the sperm. He asked himself, Is it a shame that every woman allows herself to ovulate every month without taking the opportunity to impregnate herself? Any time sperm is ever lost—and that happens when anybody is growing up—is that a big thing? His conclusion: "No, of course it's not."

"When an embryo actually starts to develop, when it starts to have some characteristics of a human—like brain structures for instance—and I admit I'm biased because I'm a neuroscientist—that has much more value than a blastocyst," he explains. "You know, the blastocyst is a 150-cell ball of tissue that's not a lot more complex than an egg."

Keirstead says he overcame his reluctance about talking to Christianity Today because the stem-cell field is "mired in misunderstanding" and he wants people to have an "educated view" of the issue. I had hoped for an honest dialogue, but instead was flabbergasted by his responses, which were by turns illogical, inconsistent, and disingenuous.

For example, he claims that only two human embryos had been destroyed to create the federally approved stem-cell lines used in his research. Surprised by this declaration, I asked if he anticipated the destruction of any other embryos in his work. "No," he said. "For the rest of my career, probably no. I have what I need." (He later back-pedalled, admitting that he would like one or two more lines for "racial diversity.")

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October 2005, Vol. 49, No. 10