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Stanford Jumps Into Cloning Fray
smackthud writes "According to this article in the Minneapolis StarTribune website Stanford University is planning to clone human embryos. Story summary says it all: 'Stanford University announced today its intention to clone human embryos, becoming the first U.S. university to publicly embrace the politically charged procedure. The intent of the project is to produce stem cells for medical research.'" Stanford has released a statement distinguishing what Stanford is doing from reproductive cloning.
...Begun, this clone war has......
"The intent of the project is to produce stem cells for medical research."
The benefits of this is to great to avoid doing it. If the cells are not cloned in the US, they will be bought from abroad, so the result will be the same anyway. Brave of Stanford to dare doing this in the US anyhow!
cloning, nature's way of saying: imagine a beowulf cluster of yourself!
Fleur de Sel
It would seem even the mighty media can mislead us! Maybe the perception of the average person is changing but it seems that most people can't distinguish between cloning human cells and cloning a human. Most people see cloning as the bad sci-fi movies portray it, person goes in onside of the machine, two or more people come out the other side, identical in every way. Blah BLah Blah, it goes on and on. Hopefully one of these days the journalists will do some informed research before posting these things.
SU researchers probably will have to clone stem cells of human embryos, which is something different (in my opinion) than cloning human embryos.
Still an interesting question remains. If they will clone stem cells, will that be a next step to the cloning of human beings? Usually having a technique means it will be used...
giel.y contains 2 shift/reduce conflicts
The intent of the project is to produce stem cells for medical research.
And why isn't everyone doing this? Oh right, it's against the presidents religious beliefs. Is it really suprising that people would rather pursue research that might aid in a cure for cancer, rather than follow a law set by Bush that stem cell research is against his religious beliefs?
Outdoor digital photography, mostly in New Engl
I'm not opposed to abortion but this seems pretty weasley (no offense to weasles) way to get out of the abortion issue. Lets just get on with stem cell research and quit playing games. Stanford takes the high road and explain their "clean" procedure (parenthetical quotes are mine):
Creating human stem cell lines is not equivalent to reproductive cloning. The first step in the process of creating a stem cell line involves transferring the nucleus from a cell to an egg and allowing the egg to divide. This is the same first step as in reproductive cloning. However in creating a stem cell line, cells (parts of the fetus) are removed (dismembered) from the developing cluster (fetus). These cells can go on to form many types of tissues, but cannot on their own develop into a human (because they are just pieces of dismembered human tissue).
How is this procedure different from whats going on in the rest of the world? I guess the Christian right wingers can sleep well at night now.
What is the world coming to?
What is the world coming to?
Original post:
"If these ppl do this they should be jailed and bared from science. I hope they are stopped but if its to late and they do it before the feds can stop them, they need to be severly punished. This is life we are talking about we can't allow ppl to just play with it."
Repaired post:
"If these people do this, they should be jailed and barred from science. I hope they are stopped, but if it's too late, and they do it before the feds can stop them, they need to be severely punished. This is life we are talking about. We can't allow people to just play with it."
Why does there seem to be a proportional relationship between the extremity of a fundamentalist and poor grammar?
Intelligence level, maybe? Nah, couldn't be that...
Knunov
Why do users with IDs under 100,000 or over 700,000 usually have the most worthwhile comments?
I've always been of the opinion that cloning, genetic engineering, etc were Good Things. This is technology that can potentially cure genetic diseases like cystic fibrosis or Huntington's disease in people who already suffer from it as well as prevent it from ever showing up in the first place. Then of course there is cancer. Imagine treatments that would simply repair the sections of our DNA sequence that MUST be damaged in order for any cancer to form. Forget radiation and chemotherapy that are simply attempts to kill the cancer without killing the patient. Fix the anti-cancer genes in the cancer cells and they kill themselves.
I think that genetic engineering can, in the hands of those who are honest, wise, and well intentioned, also be used to enhance human abilities without trying to alter human nature. Human nature might not be perfect, but I don't trust anyone to try and make it better. This is where genetic engineering gets risky in my opinion, when it gives people with an agenda for who and what mankind should be the tools to warp human beings into their twisted model of human behavior. Just imagine if the looney left or the religious right were to become the keepers of the technology. How many bolsheviks and bible thumpers could they create? There are already enough idiots and brainwashed buffoons in the world without a breeding program to manufacture them.
Anyway I'm glad this is being done by Stanford. Of course you'll hear nothing but screaming from the idiots of the world, but such is the burden of scientific progress. At least nowadays you don't have to worry about the inquisition murdering you for daring to contradict the codified superstition that passes for mankind's understanding of the divine.
Lee
Muslim community leaders warn of backlash from tomorrow morning's terrorist attack.
I imagine there are plenty of people who would limit stem cell research for non-religious reasons. After all, this quickly degenerates into an abortion debate.
Pro-life reasoning is that human life deserves protection all the way back to conception. Pro-abortion reasoning is that human life deserves protection only after some period of development (varying according to who's talking). Pro-life groups advocate protection all the way back to conception because they see no rational reason to draw the line anywhere else.
It is therefore not necessarily a religious motivation under which Bush limited stem cell research. Not that it wasn't a religious motivation. But an experienced politician at the top of the game knows better than to try to legislate his religious ideas without a separate rational argument.
If you don't want to protect human life as an embryo, why should your human life be protected now? What is your argument that your life is intrinsically more valuable than a human embryo to be used in stem cell research, or the Jews experimented on by the Nazis? Where and how do you draw the line at where the value of human life begins?
The question of when to begin protection of human life, embryo, fetus, child or adult must precede any argument for other uses of potentially adult human embryos, no matter how useful or convenient any use or disuse of the embyo may be. If a human life is deserving of the same rights as any adult or child then no one else has any right to determine how that life is to be spent.
Stem cell research is perhaps the MOST promissing medical research ever ... It would be a crime to not allow it. I'm ok with the government restricting funds for it, but don't disallow private institutions (or publically funded ones if those public funds aren't going to the research) to persue it.
Of course that's not to say I wouldn't mind seeing some public funds go to it! But in the US, public funds are supposed to go where the people want it. If the majority of citizens don't want it, then that's what the government should do.
That brings up the question... what does the majority want?
I know 2 people with MS (not microsoft)... if this can help them, then why not?
There are few things I know within the core of my being. The idea that cloning etc. is somehow inherently wrong just isn't one of them. For me to believe it is wrong would require some evidence to that effect, or at least a valid argument against it. I'm sorry, but appeals to emotion just don't cut it.
Lee
Muslim community leaders warn of backlash from tomorrow morning's terrorist attack.
I'm not sure I follow you. WHAT exactly are they doing that makes them criminals? You say that they are playing with life and the implication is that it is somehow wrong. Isn't playing with life exactly what biologists and medical researchers have been doing all along? I guess you'd rather we do without things like anti-biotics and vaccines, both of which were created/discovered by the process of playing with life that you seem to have a problem with.
Lee
Muslim community leaders warn of backlash from tomorrow morning's terrorist attack.
Read The Washington Post's article, which notes: "The new institute, which will aim to create stem cell therapies for cancer and other diseases, is to be established with $12 million from an anonymous donor. Under a Bush administration policy announced last year, federally funded researchers wishing to work with human embryonic stem cells must limit their endeavors to a small number of approved cell colonies created before Aug. 9, 2001. But because the Stanford institute will be privately funded, researchers there will be able to create and experiment on new colonies."
Bush's decision was based on his own moral standard, which does happen to have a biblical base. Others may have a moral system based on other religions, or a professional standard such as the Hippocratic Oath, or some amorphous PC nonstandard that changes from day to day, depending on which special interest group wants justification for their "lifestyle".
As we move closer to the end of the age, look for more decisions to be made based on the "common good", "world order", and "tolerance" rather than individual rights and dignity.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
I forget the name, but it technically is not cloning! Though it's moving a nucleus from a real person to an egg, it's not cloning.
Furthermore, there's some 19-ish (bio majors correct me) cell limit before it becomes and embryo. It's not getting something that resembles a human and tearing it apart for cells, as it never gets past a very small ball of [stem] cells!
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
Your use of the word "Pro-abortion" gives your position away immediately. No matter how rational you try to make yourself sound, you kill your argument by using such rhetoric.
To answer your question, you are not a human being until you have a functioning brain. An embryo is not a human but rather human tissue with the potential to become a human. Potential is not actual. I have a penis therefor I am potentially a rapist. I am not a rapist, however.
The difference is not as subtle as you believe.
One of my favorite maxims is that religion stops a thinking mind. I'm not entirely sure that it is true anymore, but it is good for pissing some people off and making other people laugh.
Nowadays I'm much more convinced that religious zeal fulfills a psychological need in those who don't want to think in the first place. They tune in, turn on, and drop out. This is all done without drugs because for them religion is a drug.
It is commonly known to psychologists that there is a strong correlation between drug abuse and religion. If you look at families that have a history of drug or alcohol abuse you'll find that the ones who don't end up on drugs tend to end up being religious freaks. Some even start out as one and later become the other. For them religion truly is an opiate.
Now I'm not saying the everyone who believes in God or has religious beliefs is a religion junkie. Religion is not inherently evil. I myself believe in God, but don't make any claims to understand what God is. Religion is a human invention and as such relfects human weaknesses and imperfections.
The problems I have with religion are with those who refuse to accept its shortcomings, who want to pretend that their religious beliefs somehow supercede reality itself. This is the classic battle between science and superstition. Religious factions that want to choose superstition are going to lose out in the long run because within a few generations they won't have any more followers, or will become extreme fringe groups. I don't want to see this happen because the only thing worse than religion is its abscence. Nature abhors a vacuum. Just imagine the BS and nonesense that would fill in the place that religion currently holds in areas such as ethics and morals. We've already got enough permeation of political correctness and the ideologies from which it is created without such nonsense becoming the univeral norm.
Lee
Muslim community leaders warn of backlash from tomorrow morning's terrorist attack.
The therapeutic cloning approach of the Stanford researchers also has great potential, but the process of creating and destroying embryos to harvest stem cells seems to be more complicated than using adult stem cells. Further, some experiments in which embryonic stem cells were reimplanted ominously gave rise to carcinomas. Many research scientists think both approaches should be pursued.
I'm a biochemist here at Stanford and Irv Weissman (the dude in charge of the project) is not talking about cloning at all. He's talking about taking existing stem cell lines, and swapping in new genetic material. It's a modification of existing cell lines that involves no new egg cells (or sperm cells), no fertilization, and no organismic development. Even the US Catholic League is okay with this. Besides, if it fell under the definition of human cloning, Stanford would lose federal funding, which it is certainly not willing to risk. I am very much against actual human cloning for a variety of ethical reasons, but this honestly isn't even close. Swapping interesting genes in and out of an existing cell line in order to study them is really not a big deal.
This should definitely put the pressure on governments to open the doors to stem cell research.
Interesting. Now, tell me, what governments (except the US) has closed those doors, to begin with?
You know, there are several lines of stem cells being researched upon within a 10km radius of me even as I write this.
The only effect of US religious rights conniption over stem cells is that the US get harder to keep up in this area of science (and, to be fair, this might slow the progression of the science somewhat).
But still, in the long run, it doesn't change a thing.
"First lesson," Jon said. "Stick them with the pointy end."
I suppose you've opened the proverbial can of worms already, so I'll clarify the stance of those opposed to fetal cell research for you: When does a human life become worth protecting?
What makes childbirth a defining moment between being a human being and not a human being? If that's not the moment at which to protect a human against death, then when does it happen? Is it in the 3rd trimester? Is it at two years old? Is it when they pass some formal IQ test?
What I don't like about both abortion and fetal stem cell research is that someone is arbitrarily deciding that a human lifeform doesn't have a right to live based on their own or someone else's selfish needs. It's ethically no different from killing someone for food because you're poor and you need it to live. Sure, you can argue about the sentience of an embryo, but then do you advocate allowing people to kill and harvest life-saving organs from severely retarded people or people in comas? What about people in cryogenic suspension? Should we treat them as "corpsicles" and take their organs for living people too? At what point does a human's right to live end (or never begin) without connection to any actions that they have done? These arguments over the worth of a human life and human dignity aren't any different from those who advocated slavery and forced sterilization on the basis of the inferiority of the victims in comparison to enfranchised society. If you place any value on human life beyond that of your immediate friends and family, then you should object to an arbitrarily drawn line on human worth.
That is why many of us object to fetal stem cell research. There are so many possibilities for bone marrow research that could save lives without creating and killing them. We explore them fully before less ethically sound path just because it's easier.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
---It would be hard to argue that a newborn is sentient.---
Are YOU sentient? Can't you see how ridiculous this example is: comparing the sentience of a new born to something that doesn't even have a NERVOUS SYSTEM? While I think the parent goes overboard in his definition of sentience, you go overboard in the opposite direction.
---That said, when you do what they are doing at Stanford you create life that has the potential for sentience---
A pile dog crap has the potential for sentience: a mother eats it, digests it, and the nutrients become part of the baby she's growing inside her. Same difference. It's _existing_ sentience that's the problem, not potential. Everything all the way back to the beginning of time might as well be potential.