Slashdot Mirror
Harvard Scientists to Clone Human Embryos
An anonymous reader writes "Harvard University scientists claim they will soon start trying to clone human embryos to create stem cells. Even with the history of controversy and fraud researchers hope they can one day use the newly created stem cells to aid in battle against many diseases. From the article: 'The privately funded work is aimed at devising treatments for such ailments as diabetes, Lou Gehrig's disease, sickle-cell anemia and leukemia. Harvard is only the second American university to announce its venture into the challenging, politically charged research field.'"
Ever since some of us started looking into nature people have said, "you know, that's God's work, you shouldn't really been looking at it."
Just a few years ago the Pope told Steven Hawking that though the Catholic Church believed in the theory of the big bang, what happened before that was the hand of God and not to be meddled into be humans.
If we could rid ourselves of silly arbitrary superstitions great advancements in science will follow.
After Nagisake and Hiroshima got atomic bombed, it provided a test bed for scientists on the effects of radiation poisoning and the aftereffects of the bomb.
Should they have closed their eyes and ignored it because the atomic bomb was reprehensible?
The scientist who study stemcells are much in the same position, they are not in the decision chain when a woman gets an abortion. I don't think stem cell research are the driving force why women do get abortions. But they happen.
Should we close our eyes and pretend that the benefits doesn't exist? The future baby has already died. Don't let it die completely in vain.
I'll certainly admit that when one takes religion too far, it causes more problems than it solves and tends to shy away from rationality. But this is true of any ideal (politics, for example), and not just of religion. I don't think it is quite fair to categorize all religious points of view as uninformed and completely irrelevant.
I don't see where the big morality issue is. If you saw a man with a wife, children, friends and a job, and he was dying of some disease, as the rest of his family looks on helplessly, would you leave him to die if you had the option of saving him? Why does the life of an embryo with no family, or home, or even gurantee of survival, outweigh the life of someone who is already established in society; who loves and is loved, who has built up a life, and who would be sorely missed by many people? This is a pretty clear-cut moral decision.
The government will shut this down. Speaking as an American, and as one with a severely handicapped child, the day the United States values science that much over superstitious ignorance is the day pigs fly. For over ten years, I've only looked to other countries for scientific advancement. That's where I'm looking for the advancement of medical science, too, and I've been seeing it there.
Then identical twins only have half a soul each.
As someone who has loved ones afflicted with three of the four conditions mentioned, I'm all for it.
I'm not religious. I don't believe that an embryo is a life. It's a collection of cells with the ability to become life if allowed to develop fully.
Please don't mod this as flamebait or troll. I'm not alone. This just happens to be my point of view and I believe that if cures and treatments may be found from such research I will support it wholly until the day I die.
It's been painful watching my Uncle deteriorate by the week. He's afflicted with ALS (Lou Gehrigs). I've attended the funeral of a six-year-old girl who died of leukemia. My uncle has lost his sight due to diabetes.
Those who oppose such research based on their religion, to me, are no better than those who deny life saving treatments to their children or themselves due to religious reasons. Religion makes people do things like this.
Why is it so hard to imagine that your God gave man the ability to do such things as a means to improve our lives?
Then any form of payment for an abortion to a pregnant (or recently pregnant) woman should be what is illegal, not the science that comes after it.
I guess some of you have a quite expicit picture in your mind, a little less developed baby, as somebody here even said baby killer. May be you should know that cloning an embryo to "produce" stem cells means, that you have a developing human, yes, but this developing human is a little sphere of cells. This aggregation of cells becomes a blastocyst and one part of it becomes the embryo. Befor this happens you want to take out these cells, as these cells are omnipotent stem cells, which means they can develop and differenciate into different tissues, hopefully and only once there a implanted there. In the future they may even develop into tissue ex vivo i.e. outside of your body, but thats far fetched.
If you say that this amount of cells are already a human being, than you have to monitor every female human, as natural failure after fertilization occurs every moment. Most women get pregnant and lose their "baby" in the first six weeks without even noticing.
Cloning human (tissue even) is certainly something one should discuss, but keep in mind that you put a very high value on one unborn human, while the same society doesn't have any problem in spending 100 times more on military (and using it) than others on medicine.
Furthermore all the implications this may have on society should be discussed; a longer life span, but less and less work for everybody (now a problem in europe and US, soon one in china and india), who will get the benefit, the one with money or everybody? In other words will we have rich 1000 year old and poor that won't reach the age of 80?
Certainly a lot to discuss, but you have to get some background knowledge, otherwise it is just "I have a strong feeling against it"...
"People who are willing to sacrifice essential freedoms for security deserve neither freedom nor security."
B F
So why is the line drawn at fertilization? Is a woman who doesn't do her best to get and be pregnant all the time killing babies? Isn't that just a slighty different position along the same line of thinking?
Personally, I have trouble thinking of something that won't survive and grow without massive human intervention(a pregnancy is massive human intervention...) as being equal to a living, breathing person in deserving rights. I do not however, find it particularly offensive when other people disagree with this position.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
The egg clearly has chicken DNA and therefore has to be considered to be part of the chicken species.
Therefore, it is easy to deduce that the egg came first. The first chicken hatched from a chicken egg, since the species of the egg is determined by the DNA of the creature that hatches from it, not by the species that laid the egg.
Simply put: If you have an egg, and a chicken hatches from it, then it was a chicken egg, regardless of whether it was laid by a frog, an alligator, or an ostrich.
They don't get stem cells from abortions. Or, at least not many. The vaste majority of stem cells come from fertility treatments. Doctors create dozens of embryos for infertile couples who only want one or two children. Yet, even the majority of extra embryos aren't used for science. Mostly, they're thrown away. Why? Because people think it's better to leave "their children" in storage until everyone forgets about them then donate them to science so they can help people.
No one's ever going to make a career out of getting abortions for science. However, if you really believe life begins at conception, then you should be fighting against fertility treatments.
"What is Internet Explorer 7? Are you saying we can't access the normal internet?" - I love tech support. Really.
Let's add a check box to the IRS form. Check it if you want some of your tax dollars used to fund this kind of research, don't check it if you are opposed.
...
If you've always opposed this kind of research then you are not allowed to benefit from any of the treatments that may come about as a result of it. Let's see what these social conservatives have to say if it leads to cures or significant improvements in treating some of these horrible diseases somewhere down the line should they themselves become afflicted. Any nut job who takes things on "faith" (aka they believe absolutely in what they read in a book and/or in what they are told to believe in by others without any other outside supporting evidence) should not be allowed to make scientific and/or medical decisions for the rest of the country.
I don't hear many of these social conservatives bitching and moaning that their tax dollars are being used to fund the war in Iraq. Not a peep about their tax dollars being used to execute inmates. The whole "sanctity of life" principle as espoused by social conservatives is kind of selective thing, isn't it? How convenient
See, not all so-call fundamentalists live there
The ones with any juice live there. Tell me where you live and I'll drive you out of that, so.
the Puritans didn't leave England because they wanted to dodge the age of Enlightenemnt
Aha yes, well you are making the mistaken assumption that I was talking about the classical age of Enlightnment. I was rather referring to the point in time when significant powers in Europe started giving demented cults of personality the final heave-ho. You know, became enlightened.
I assume that by fundie, you mean somebody who dares say that the Bible is right, how silly of him?
So lets see here, you are saying that this book which contains a variety of often self contradicting stands on various issues, this book can be either "right" or "wrong"? Jaysus. As an historical document, its fairly entertaining. As a guide to how life is to be lived, you could do worse than certain passages. As an ironclad method to decide your every action, you are off your head, and a menace to yourself and society. Hence the crusade.
Do you really believe that it's a sign of freedom for a woman to dress in outfits that don't leave much to the imagination.
I know its a sign of slavery to forbid it, bub. And what the hell is wrong with you, you don't want to see a womans nipples? You think god gave her those as a mark of shame? Demned sodomites. CRUSADE!
And, just so you know it, I'm as opposed to revealing clothing for men as I am for women, so it's absolutely not a case of double-standards.
So you're an equal opportunities idiot. Splendid.
Very often, I hear people rant about how fundies are bad, how you can be a good christian and believe in everything liberal theology teaches.
I am not any kind of christian. I am however a very spiritual person, who lives by what I consider good morals and rules of behaviour. the only time I try to inflict those rules on others is when I meet dullard bible-junkies that honestly need a good infliction or two.
aybe you have faith in both orthodox christianity and subscribe to the widespread belief that the Bible is mostly myth, but that would simply mean that you faith would be baseless (which is stupid)
What the fuck is that? Russian orthodox or Greek orthodox? Or some peculiar vision of "straight" christianity? What a tiny little narrow world you live in, to be sure. I myself am a fan of Diderot; mankind will not be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest.
What he can't kill, he has sex on. Trent.
you are creating life precisely to destroy it.
So we can breed cattle to kill them, but cloning them directly would be wrong?
You are making young humans simply to strip-mine them for their desired cells and parts.
Not young humans, potential humans. These things aren't humans yet and, since lab created embryos
are generally not even viable (wouldn't survive to full term), these things aren't even really
potential humans.
But assuming that these things could eventually become humans, is having the potential to be
human sufficient to grant them the same rights and protections that humans get?
Do they suffer? No.
Do they even feel? No.
Is this any different from cloning liver tissue in a lab? No.
Remind me again what the arguments against this are. I can't seem to come up with any.
*sigh* back to work...
Oh, what's next ? Do you also want to question an infants "right" to be fed and cared for, huh ?
In other words: What about the children?!? (blatant appeal to emotion)
Yep, killing someone just because he causes you some inconvenience is illegal.
No, It's not. It depends on the level of inconvenience. You can kill someone if they are about to chop a limb off, or rape you, or if they are about to do the same to someone else. If they are about to kill someone else (which doesn't really inconvenience you at all) you can still kill them.
It's called "justifiable homicide" and it happens pretty damn often.
Babies are either people or their not, you seem to want them to be elevated to have more rights than the humans that can support life on their own. One can infer from this that you believe in some type of higher moral purpose to protect the infant above the rights of the individual that will be forced to act like a life support system for it for nine months.
So what church did you say you went to again?
The reality - the cold hard fact - is that scientific research will simply relocate to Taipei (which has a fine series of labs doing stem cell research), China (yes, they do this too), the Caribbean (many Dutch and French labs), or Europe.
We either lose the genetic research race or we win it. Shutting the doors won't stop the research, it will just make we scientists do the research in other countries, which will then get the glory of the Nobel Prize.
It's time to pay attention to the reality of research - it can be done anywhere with sufficient power, a good building, and the scientific funding.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
How many friends friends have you had that have miscarried after a few weeks? As they cried over the loss of their babies, did you reassure them that they had only lost some "tissue," no different from, as you say, as "liver"?
I miscarried at 6 weeks. The tissue and blood that came out of me was not a baby. I did not cry.
Women who cry over a miscarriage a few weeks in would cry just as much if they had gotten their periods a few weeks prior. That is to say, they are crying because they wanted to be pregnant now, and they're not. What comes out looks nothing like a baby, and could never be confused for one.
"What is Internet Explorer 7? Are you saying we can't access the normal internet?" - I love tech support. Really.