You are free to do as you wish, within the bounds of your conscience and the law - do you deny that? Assuming you agree, are you free to kill another? Gun down your hypothetical Timmy? Perhaps you are willing to accept constraints, after all.

When is a unique individual created? Forget religion, just answer this from science. You know the answer - sperm, egg, fertilization, dna & all that. This whole question is about speaking up for that unique creation, which we may have facilitated to occur in an insanely stupid place (a test tube), and literally placed on ice. So then, unlike state in the summary, the problem is about picking and choosing who lives and dies, WITHOUT THEIR CONSENT. How can that possibly be difficult to understand?

Anyone care to count the useful (efficacious, "safe" for the recipient) therapies delivered from embryonic stem cells? It's actually easy - none. Despite this, let's assume knock-it-out-of-park efficaciousness for embryonic stem cell research (just for the sake of this discussion) ... what about that "killing babies" thing ... ok or not? I say "not" ... as does the preponderance of human history.

The architecture needs to match the problem as well ... which is not the case here. Twitter is a modest msg routing problem, RoR sticks a DB into the flow of every msg, and DBs make really, really bad routers. No surprise that it's run into problems this early.