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Cloning Yields Human-Rabbit Hybrid Embryo
ralphb writes "Here is the story of scientists in China who have, for the first time, used cloning techniques to create hybrid embryos that contain a mix of DNA from both humans and rabbits. Hop on over for a look!"
This is just the sort of thing that will catch the attention of do-gooder congressmen and get things like cloning research completely banned...If they do things like this, they should keep it quiet, not get it out into the mainstream of public opinion where people can jump (or maybe hop-hop-hop) to conclusions and phone their congressman.
Even regular cloning causes most of the subjects to die. I can't imagine interspecies cloning not killing many many more. Most likely, this embryo will die after a few divisions, being so strange. However, even "successful" clones have more problems and a shorter lifespan. Doing this should be unethical by anyone's standards.
Judgeing from the artical they might have found a better way to get stem cells for research. However, now instead of having to deal with just people that are anti-cloning or anti-stem cell research, you would also have to deal with the animal rights activists because of the retrevial of the eggs, and the undertermined status of the cells after they are created.
So in the short run it is posibly a better way to get stem cells, in the long run it will raise alot of ethical concerns, as well as the undermined nature of the cell - in short we don't know if they are "true" stem cells in their ablity to grow into any organ. Also, if they do have the potenital to become any organ, we don't know how the human body would react to the foegin DNA (the rabit mitocadria)
I don't claim to be a DNA expert but I'll bet the people opposing these kinds of exparaments know even less about DNA than I do.
Somewhere I've read that we share most of our DNA with all the other members of the animal kingdom and indeed we share a lot of DNA with every living thing.
Some of these exparaments are "pure research" and others are "applied research." In pure research you do the exparament and then look to see where it took you. In applied research you have a pretty good idea of where you are going and are pretty much conducting the exparament to verify your theory. In either case, there really is a goal to the research and I'll submit that the goal is usually good for humanity.
Without this kind of research we would miss out on opportunities to cure disease, treat birth defects and, all sorts of other good things. But, there is something even better that comes from this research. We gain a greater understanding of the world we live in. We add to humankinds knowlege base. Without doing this we will fail to advance and the next century will look like the last. When that happens there is little doubt that we will have started to slide down the road to extinction becuase we will exhaust vital resources.
In other words, this IS important research, that has the potential of providing important material for research projects that might take medical science huge leaps forwards.
This kind of knee-jerk 'this is bad/immoral/whatever' comment, even though you clearly didn't finish (start?) reading the article is exactly the kind of piss-poor commentary that prevents science doing good.
J.
You're only jealous cos the little penguins are talking to me.
For example, if a human embryo with three of a given chromosome is formed, depending on which chromosome it forms on, the embryo may either fail to develop past the 8 cell stage, or develop into a 10 week fetus and die, or develop longer and die, but never become viable outside the womb. Down's syndrome is unique in that it and sex chromosome triploidies are the only triploidies that are compatible with life. Other triploidies result in miscarriage or failure to implant.
Unfortunately, I had to learn about this the hard way.
It's not wasting time, I'm educating myself.
I've never understood where this idea comes from. When you have sex, the number of sperm released is typically in nine figures {decimal}. Out of all those sperm, most will not fuse with an egg. Perhaps one {single birth or identical twins} or rarely two {non-identical twins}, even rarer more than two. Most likely, none of them will find an egg.
If a man has sex just once and gets his girlfriend pregnant, one sperm has done its job but there are still hundreds of millions of sperm wasted. Now if a man had sex twice a day every day for seventy years and each instance of sex conceives exactly one child, that is just over 50000 babies - and trillions of sperm. Most of which were just never going to make it. So if you had a w**k twice a day for seventy years you might have wasted trillions of sperm, but since most of them were never really going to go anywhere anyway, you have only really wasted one per shot. And there are sufficiently more sperm in a single ejaculation to make that quite insignificant by comparison.
As they say, sperm are tiny, but it only takes one of them to fill a pram!
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
Ok, I was almost down to the bottom of the page moderating, and had to back out to respond to this point.
You have come close to hitting on the quintessential question behind all of the debate.
What makes a human a human?
Arguably, the most important criteria for being human is awareness... consciousness.
Here's a rather graphic gedanken:
Shave off all your hair... are you still human? What if you amputate your arms and legs? How about body organs? Artificial heart, kidney dialysis, iron lung, etc... Take this beyond what is possible with modern day science... brain in a vat. Quality of life has certainly decreased dramatically! However, the brain is still thinking, the software of mind is still running. What if it were possible to run the software on other hardware? Sure, cyberpunk has beat this topic to death... but I certainly don't consider my brain to be me! To quote Rene Descartes: "cogito ergo sum". Nothing else is relevant... software is everything (yeah, I'm a programmer ;-) )
Unfortunately, science has not been able to answer the question of when during development the spark of consciousness begins.
Can we agree that awareness requires a brain? Can we agree that this brain needs to be working... ie. the synapses are firing, neural potentials exist?
If so, then consciousness must begin sometime between 4 and 6 months of development.
This experiment was limited to 14 days of development. This is the point when cells begin to differentiate. Clearly this is long before a brain and the potential for consciousness arises.
Really, this is an ideal stop-gap measure. If by mixing mitochondrial DNA of another species with human nuclear DNA you achieve a development term necessary for medicinal purposes, and at the same time insure development self-aborts prior to brain development, then you end up with a self regulating procedure that prevents the accidental creation of a human consciousness.
It appears Ockham lost his razor and grew a beard.
I vote for cheetahs. I want my cat-girl, dammit.
Forget thrust, drag, lift and weight. Airplanes fly because of money.
Hate to nitpick, but this is a really important point from an ethical standpoint. The eggs that were collected were from rabbits. The rabbit nuclear DNA was removed, and replaced with human DNA.
It's the same end result--an egg with human nuclear DNA and rabbit mitochondrial DNA--but the original eggs were harvested from rabbits. This is potentially a very useful technique, because it represents a source of embryonic stem cells that doesn't require the collection of eggs from humans--a time-consuming, costly, and potentially dangerous process.
Aside: There is no intention to allow these chimeric embryos to mature into some sort of science fiction half-man half-rabbit hybrid--the Chinese government limited the researchers to fourteen days growing time. The only purpose of these experiments is to develop a new source of embryonic stem cells.
~Idarubicin
"I think because all the nuclear DNA is human," Doerflinger said, "we'd consider this an organism of the human species."
I think because all the ROM code is extracted from a Macintosh, we'd consider a PC running this emulator a system of the Macintosh platform.
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
Do you celebrate your conception day? How about your Birthday?
It's a common misconception to call someone who is pro-choice a "pro-abortionist". Most "pro-choice" people that I know don't go around encouraging pregnant women to have abortions. None of the pro-choice women I know have ever had an abortion.
In regards to your comment about a fertilized egg being a human being, well... I think that depends on what you mean. Is it genetically distinct from its parents? Yes. Does it contain human DNA? Yes. Is it a person? Debatable. A fertilized egg does not have a brain, a personality, or any sense of its environment. Is it possible to lack these qualities and still be considered human? That's a matter of viewpoint.
psmylie's dictionary: Godzillion (noun) Any number large enough to destroy Tokyo
They define clinical human death as the absense of brainwave activity, so why don't they define clinical human life as the presence of brainwave activity?
Oh, right, it's hard to attach emotions to a EEG.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Again, this is the fallacy of false equivalence. One human is in a state of deterioration. The other is in a state of growth and development.
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Once the eeg is flat in an adult human being, it will not recur. Using a flatt eeg to define death, or the end of life, was arrived at biologically. A flat eeg indicates the death of the human being. Individual components may continue on for a few hours or days, but the organism as a whole is dead
In a developing human being, organism will start with a flat eeg, then beging to show increasing development and complexity. The organism is already alive, and will continue to grow in complexity as time passes.
You can tell a great deal about the character of a man by observing those who hate him.
Yes I read the article.
Perhaps I was thinking about one of the possible consequences of this line of research.
It does pose other ethical questions just on its on. From the very bottom of the article
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Richard Doerflinger, of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, said he felt certain that the human-rabbit embryos were human enough to deserve protections.
"I think because all the nuclear DNA is human," Doerflinger said, "we'd consider this an organism of the human species."
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It begs one of the most basic questions of human existence: are we ghosts in the machine or are we purely material beings?
If we are ghosts in the machine then the bodies we inhabit are a temporary form of existence that will be transcended. So the risk for the future can not be in complete jeopardy regardless of what we do to the bodies of future generations.
From a materialist point of view I should think that this is more frightening. The very definition of self for future generations is potentially at stake. Genetic manipulation brought about the prospect of designer babies but that was generally limited to human DNA or even limited the potential to selecting which genetic traits a baby will have from it's parents (as in Gataca). But raises the specter of animal DNA getting in to the mix.
Perhaps it is too far off for you and I specifically to worry about but they day will come when these are real concerns. Perhaps sooner than later.
The way that (real) stem cells are collected (or used to be collected) is in such a way that no moral dilemma exists anyway. When a woman goes in for artificial insemination, several eggs are removed from her body. These eggs are all impregnated a once, and then cryogenically frozen (-500 C). These eggs are defrosted one at a time and put back inside the womans uterus. This process continues until a child is born. Then all of the embryos that could have become humans are (get this) thrown away. Those embryos are the stem cells that can really become _anything_ that they are exposed to. Cells from things like placenta (and very possibly rabbits) are already biased and not truely stem cells.
What, I ask you, moral dillema exists when given a choice between studying these embryos and throwing them away. It is not as if these embyos are going to ever become viable fetuses either way.