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Scientists Claim They Cloned Humans
dustinbarbour writes "A South Korean-led research team has cloned human embryos to produce embryonic stem cells, a scientific first that promises to reignite public debate over cloning. Medical researchers hope to use cloned embryonic stem cells to someday treat diseases such as diabetes and Parkinson's. The cells potentially could create rejection-free transplant organ tissues." There's another story in the NYT.
Am in support of using stem-cells to repair organs. It's not really unehical at all. I mean an embryo doesn't have a personality or a self so it's hardly going to miss being alive.
What's with the sensatioanlistic headlines this morning? KAZAA'ers PAY TO USE VPN TO BYPASS RIAA on a story about a company who offers public vpn for $6, with no implicit mention of Kazaa or FileSharing. And now WE'VE CLONED A HUMAN about a korean company who has cloned only an embryo to only a very early stage to generate stem cells, not making Steve 2.0 from Steve. Let's not go overboard, or am I talking out of turn? This is Slashdot, of course. Overboard is the story d'jour.
Th
Your stem cells can be collected and stored at birth, from the cord blood that is thrown away anyway when they tie the knot to make your belly button. It should be standard practice to store them now from newborns for when stem cell technology matures in the future.
When I was at Uni, they told us a US company held a patent on the harvesting(?) of cord blood stem cells, and demanded a license fee which is hampering the introduction of this. Don't know how true that is.
Nevertheless, this bypasses peoples squemishness on the use of embryos for this type of thing, though I don't have a problem with it myself. I can see why this work has been done, but there are a number of ways to generate this material that isn't morally suspect.
Meine Schwester ist sehr, sehr reizvoll - Nietzsche
On this morning's Today programme on BBC Radio 4, this very thing was discussed. One of the interesting arguments: at what point to we determine an embryo a human being?
Is a ball of 100 human embryo cells a human being? One woman on the program was claiming - yes, this is so. I personally think that this is a bit extreme, almost "every sperm is sacred" extreme.
On an unrelated note, I find it ironic that the same people who claim that abortion at day 3 is criminal are often pro-death penalty.
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What are the chances that when I get older I'll need to go overseas for a one of these new transplants (Now rejection free! Two kidneys for price of one!) because the US has banned all stem cell research and related items.
--- Ban humanity.
Slipper slope fallacy - actually, one doesn't necessarily lead to the other. Therapeutic cloning can be done without us having to do reproductive cloning.
"In my opinion, and that of the majority of the Council, the only way to prevent this from happening here is for Congress to enact a comprehensive ban or moratorium on all human cloning."
False Dillema fallacy. Kass is saying that we either completely ban all cloning, or we'd have to deal with and accept all types of cloning. In actuality, we can allow cloning for therapeutic purposes(you know, to save lives), while disallowing, or greatly limiting it for reproductive purposes(eg allow it for people who have no other way to reproduce, but disallow it for people who want to clone a legion of duplicates to satisfy their vanity/megalomaniacal ambitions).
Ok, but after self reflection, I confirm my existence because I am aware of my self. I do not confirm my existence because I am white.
Also, as far as we know, and yes it is a "logical jump", thinking can be measured by measuring brain activity. So this seems like it is a far more objective measure of life/no-life than any other currently purposed measure.
The "when it is born" measure is obviously flawed because it is largely based on the location of one's body (inside vs outside the womb).
But the "when it was conceived" measure is also flawed as we could claim that sperm and eggs are living humans because they have the "potential" for life. So a menstrating women is committing manslaughter and so is a man, who lets a sperm go to waste. We could even go back further and say that the materials used to create a sperm have "potential" for life...
Pretty clear - they DID clone embryos, then killed them.
Let's not get into a killing-an-embryo-is-killing-humans discussion. A 7-day old human embryo is indistinguishable from most other embryos at that percentage through fetal developemnt (~1/39th). At 1/39th development, it is identical to all mamals and almost identical to all vertebrates. Mathematically and biologically, this is no different than doing it with sheep or fish.
~Will
sig?
Which, religious issues aside, is roughly equivalent to saying that your fingernails have grown some in the past hour.
Actual division of a cloned stem cell is certainly a technical achievement, and technically an embryo I suppose, but I'm not sure it's really proper to call it such until such time as it's shown that said embryo is actually capable of cellular differentiation if the division process is continued.
If all you end up with is a mass of "flesh" you have no embryo.
KFG
Pig-human chimeras contain cell surprise...at New Scientist...here:
9 94558
...The injections must be given after the body plan of the fetus has developed, but before the immune system is active. The former ensures the animals look like normal pigs and sheep....
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99
Pigs grown from fetuses into which human stem cells were injected have surprised scientists by having cells in which the DNA from the two species is mixed at the most intimate level.
It is the first time such fused cells have been seen in living creatures. The discovery could have serious implications for xenotransplantation - the use of animal tissue and organs in humans - and even the origin of diseases such as HIV.
The adult pigs that had received human stem cells as fetuses were found to have pig cells, human cells and the hybrid cells in their blood and organs.
"What we found was completely unexpected. We found that the human and pig cells had totally fused in the animals' bodies," said Jeffrey Platt, director of the Mayo Clinic Transplantation Biology Program.
The hybrid cells had both human and pig surface markers. But, most surprisingly, the hybrid cell nuclei were found to have chromosomal DNA that contained both human and pig genes. The researchers found that about 60 per cent of the animals' non-pig cells were hybrids, with the remainder being fully human.
I CANNOT believe that these animals looked like "normal" pigs. If the Pig and Human nuclear DNA mixed, and the animal was 60% percent human, one would think that the animals were more human than pig.
Cloning isn't so bad when compared to an experiment like this gone awry.
I attended a lecture by a big-wig stem cell researcher (sorry, don't recall his name) at my University a few months back, and he addressed the topic of getting stem cells from adult tissues.
He said that the stem cell research community was initially very excited about this line of research when it first made headlines, because it could allow the same research without the ethical issues connected to embryo's.
Unfortunately, though early results looked promising, subsequent investigations cast doubt on how useful adult-derived stem cells would be compared to the unlimited pluripotential of embryonic stem cells to turn into other cell therapeutic cell types.
Also unfortunately, the prospect of using adult stem cells in place of embryonic stem cells is still ceased upon by opponents of embryonic stem research to win over those who don't know the science, and to cast the scientists as being unethical in the face of perfect alternatives. But the science doesn't back this position up.
No, the only logical point to say life has started is at the very beginning. Researchers have the unique challenge of finding ways to enhance human life without taking or harming it. Granted this can be difficult, but I have confidence that people can work within ethical limits and still find honorable ways to do the things they are now trying to do through cloning and abortion.
Where, exactly, is the beginning? Even the "moment" of conception is not an actual moment. It takes a non-insignificant amount of time for chromosomes to match up.
You also need to address the flip side of the "beginning" argument. Over half of all pregnancies end through natural abortion/failure to implant. If we assume "life has started at the very beginning" then why do we let all those people die simply because they fail to implant in their mother's wombs? That number is far greater than abortions, murders, car accidents, etc. Why are those lives valued less or treated with less care than others? If we say it's "nature", then why do we interfere with nature by making antibiotics, developing vaccines, or outlawing murder?
My point is not to start an abortion/when does life begin argument here. Rather it's to point out that you cannot simply solve an ethical issue such as this by taking one extreme viewpoint or another (or any inbetween, for that matter) and implying it logically solves all our ethical problems.
-- Fugacity: Confusing chemists since 1908