Slashdot Mirror
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.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
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