Baby Teeth Are A Source Of Stem Cells

Makarand writes "A pediatric dentist at the National Institutes of Health has found that baby teeth can be a rich source of stem cells. Just like the stem cells found in embryos from which all organs arise, the stem cells in baby teeth could be encouraged to grow into nerve cells, fat cells and the precursors to tooth cells. This alternative approach to harvesting stem cells from baby teeth could help researchers to bypass the moral debate over using embryonic stem cells for research."

Comments

Devastating arguments

[leonbrooks]

This alternative approach to harvesting stem cells from baby teeth could help researchers to bypass the moral debate over using embryonic stem cells for research.

Not quite. If this turns out to be the case, it will mean that those of us against embryonic stem cell research, where the embryonic stem cells come from a fetus destroyed for this purpose, will have a new, even more devatstating argument.

Devastating argument against what?

One of the current crop justifications for murdering your unborn baby (and several organisations are agitating to take it beyond that) is "the stem cells will go toward research". Now that baby teeth can be used instead, the force goes out of that argument.

It will never quite rank up there with lies like "it's not fully developed, you're only killing a fish" or "it can't feel anything" (your baby is a fully human baby from conception, "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny" is total bullshit (the foetuses used were doctored, and the drawings based on them doctored even further) and has been known to be bullshit for well over a hundred years, but for some reason the idea is supported and still used today; and nerves, heart, the whole nine yards are in place a few weeks after conception, generally well befor ethe mother knows she is a mother).

I disagree with senor falsification in that I don't believe that the tooth-fairy argument will be "devastating", but it will be useful and significant in the war against infanticide-for-convenience.

My own personal view is that if a mother has the right to have her child murdered in utero, she should also have the right to have her child murdered at any time up to majority. And of course, if she has the right to murder her children, then little matters like abusing them or selling them into slavery should hardly matter, should they?

Are there any sixteen-year-olds here that would care to comment on that?