To deliberately end an identifiable human life is crossing the Rubicon and is a bridge too far. Extravagant claims have been made for embryonic stem cell research but very little achievement has come from it and most admit that adult stem cell research shows much promise. Even if it did show more promise than it does, carrying out this type of research is very wrong. It is destructive experimentation on human beings, like the programme discovered in the United States where researchers left poor people with syphilis untreated so they could monitor the ravages of the disease. I assume researchers justified the gross inhumanity to the sufferers of syphilis by arguments along the lines that the possible good the new knowledge brought would help cure many others – arguments those whom they left to die untreated would hardly appreciate. This is the key point for people like me. We believe the embryo is a human person albeit a tiny person.