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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."
Anti-stem cell propoganda point #1 "stem cells come from aborted baby." This is just plain wrong. By the time you know you are pregnent, it is really too late to use the fetus for stem cells. Most (all?) research stem cells have come from fertility clinics where several harvested eggs are fertalized in vitro, then the most viable is re-implanted into the woman and comes to turn, while the others would be incinerated.
Now, you are free to say that is wrong, or even call it abortion, but firstly it is much different than a "traditional" abortion where the embryo is destroyed and/or removed from a woman's uterus, and secondly, I don't see anyone trying to ban fertility clinics.
My personal feeling is that the primary instigators of the anti-stem cell movement are actually against stem cell research because they view it as playing God and meddling in affairs we have no right to. I respect that opinion, but to disguise it as protecting the lives of "innocent children" is duplicitous.
Also, stem cell research has only been going on in a real fashion for a couple of years now, and it is one of the most promising leads in medicine and science, both for it potential to repair people and to understand how life works -- two of the most important things we do as humans. It has shown incredibal potential in laboratory animals, and the fact is it takes time to develop treatments for humans precicely because of the ethical questions in human testing, and the care researchers take to insure they are not placing their test subjects in undue risk. To write it off because it hasn't saved anybody's life yet is short sighted and naive.
Incedentally, and totally off topic, I actually think life begins well before conception, and that every cell in every creature is alive, and a beautiful mystery of the universe, including gammetes. However, this doesn't stop me from eating meat or vegtables, killing incects, taking antibiotics, using birth control, or supporting the rights of women to have abortions. The question is, when does human life begin, and the only things I am pretty sure of are that it isn't before conception or after birth. I suspect it is not particuarly close to either one of those extremes, though.
Death is a natural part of life (the last part...), and even killing: we kill plants and animals to eat and stay alive, we kill animals and bacteria that try to kill us, we step on countless incects without realizing it, untold numbers of animals die as roadkill because they don't know better and we don't think it is important enough not to build highways, and we kill each other for a variety of reasons. While I am all about keeping killing to a minimum, at the end of the day the only thing I really care about is that the human species doesn't die, and to that end I also think that we should try to stop killing born people before we worry to much about the unborn, or the non-human/non-sentient.
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.
Your use of even in that sentence implies that you previously had a moderately "devastating" argument in the first place, and you do not. Maybe this will give you an argument that rises above nonsensical (and you sure could use one of those), but to say it's devastating is a stretch.
Your statement contains two factual errors. Embryonic stem cells don't come from a fetus, they're harvested from an embryo. The cells in a fetus are too well differentiated. And the embryo in question is not "destroyed for this purpose". People who go to fertility clinics to undergo in vitro fertilization generally don't want to raise a litter of 10 kids at once. The procedure isolates the most successful of many embryos and dispenses with the rest of them. That is the purpose for which they are destroyed. I don't understand why people make such a fuss about stem cell research when the embryos are destroyed by fertility procedures in the first place. I guess anything that results in more babies in the world is less likely to generate complaints from some people.
You also speak as if you know for a fact that these baby teeth stem cells are as viable as embryonic cells. You don't know that's true at all. In general stem cells from non-embryonic sources are not as viable and are much more difficult to work with.