This is going to be a difficult column to write. I know it will offend some readers, but I feel it is so important that I cannot avoid doing so.

I'm writing, of course, about the current discussion on mixing human and animal tissues for research. It has been called the embryo debate but, in fact, that's a fallacy.

The idea is not to create embryos - new human beings from sperm and ova - but to take adult human cells from people with serious diseases, and use them for a completely new form of study.

The best way to do this, the scientists say, is to use egg cells from an animal source (that are much more plentiful and easier to obtain than human ova), empty them of their nuclear material, so that only their shells' remain, then place inside them the nuclei from cells taken from people with various diseases - almost all of them lethal and with no current cure.

The combination of this human nucleus inside an animal (usually a cow) cell will, under laboratory conditions, multiply into a mass of human cells that can be studied to determine their defects.

By adding growth factors' to these cells, they can be turned into almost any type of tissue you need to study. By doing so, such stem cells will provide a mass of new knowledge about illnesses for which we have few other avenues for research.

How you stand on whether this research should be allowed depends on whether you believe that a clump of cells created in this way is a potential human being with a soul, a Frankenstein' creation (not my word, but from a religious leader) that is abhorrent to your faith: or whether it is just a mass of cells, with no brain, bodily structure, or any other recognisably human property, that can be used for research for a few days.

Please choose your own view - I don't want to push my own.

All I would like to add is that the diseases at which this research is aimed include some of the worst that we have to tolerate today.

They include, for example, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, multiple sclerosis, motor neurone disease and muscular dystrophy, as well as many forms of cancer.

For most of you, such diseases are just words: but for families affected by them they are tragedies beyond imagination. To watch cherished parents or partners losing every vestige of what they used to be, physically and mentally, over many years, is the reality of Alzheimer's.

To be locked into a stiffened, motionless, shaking body is the end process of many with Parkinson's.

Multiple sclerosis takes away the young active years of adult life from thousands of Britons every year.

Motor neurone disease hits many middle-aged adults, who know from the day of diagnosis that they have only a few years to live, during which time they will become progressively weaker and more helpless.

For me, worst of all, because it ends life so brutally quickly, is muscular dystrophy. I've known three families who had to live with children dying from it. None of the children with it survived into later teen age. No parent, or brother or sister, ever recovers completely from the experience.

We need to use every possible resource to study these diseases and eventually conquer them.

I am happy to accept that people who oppose such techniques on religious grounds do express their forceful opinions on them, but may I ask that they do so in the full knowledge of what the research entails?

That they don't use comparisons with Frankenstein in their conversations, and that they respect that other people are taking what they truly believe to be an equally moral and ethical stand when they support the research.

I have met many dedicated medical researchers - I worked in medical research myself for seven years, so I am qualified to express a view on them.

They are every bit as concerned about the ethics and morality of modern research as are those who oppose them.

We have made huge progress in the cures and management of lethal diseases in recent years. Please let us have a rational debate, founded on knowledge, not emotion, on the subject, so that we can do even better.