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New Hope for Stem Cell Research
ExE122 writes "A new scientific breakthrough allows scientists to harvest stem cells without harming the embryo. From the article: ''We have shown that we can not only generate stem cells without destroying the embryo, but that the remaining embryo also has the potential to go to on create a healthy blastocyst' said Dr Lanza, whose team's research is published in Nature. Asked if he expected the advance to satisfy President Bush, Dr Lanza said: 'Well, as you know, the President objects to the fact that you would be sacrificing one life to save another, and in this instance there is no harm to the embryo.''"
Pro-life people are generally against cloning. I don't understand the objection if no embryo is destroyed, but it does bring up some difficult issues regarding souls.
This is similar enough to cloning to trigger the same hostility. I don't really see the difference it will make.
Not to mention the problem of what to do with the excess embryos after the desired number of offspring has been reached. I don't understand how pro-life POV can accept fertility treatments that generate extra embryos.
Man, you really need that seminar!
I'll have you know that I plan on, and know many "right wing right-to-life zealot's" that plan on, or already have, adopted. We are well aware that if we say adoption is the best option we have to step up and make it possible. You insensitive clod.
where's the Left Wing Say-anything-to-get-me-elected-zealot?
now all those banks that have unused, stored embryos can keep them alive until they throw them in the garbage instead of killing them!
/obvious
'Well, as you know, the President objects to the fact that you would be sacrificing one life to save another, and in this instance there is no harm to the embryo.'
I can just see it now. Bush will claim something like, "By sticking to our upstanding morals, we have driven science further than any other generation ever."
Bush is like a broken path in the Internet. Science will route around him.
"Lab Tech 2: "Would you like to adopt one? Right Wing Right-to-Life Zealot: "Absolutely not!!! I insist they not be murdered, but I'm no charity, go find someone else to raise it!"
Makes sense.... as much as the idea that anyone opposed to the death penalty being should be required to take death row inmates into their homes.
Where were you when the voynix came?
I wish folks would stop using that word and find another one. "Harvest" gets a lot of folks riled up and gives them the impression that people are going to be farmed (or whatever) for their parts.
Yeah, yeah, I know that's not the case, but in this day and age of bumper sticker sound bites, that's all people hear and they don't want to investigate further. They'll just jump to the first two-bit opinion that fits or the opinion that was given to them by a pundit and to hell with the facts.
The President objects to things he doesn't understand.
That's not true. The President does not object to a great many things that he doesn't understand.
Perhaps you meant that he objects to things that he is aware he doesn't understand.
> The President objects to things he doesn't understand.
Clearly untrue! The President has always been an avid supporter of the war in Iraq.
Forget where I read this but it illustrates the hypocrisy of the right-to-life kooks.
Your friend is working in an in vitro lab. The place catches fire, do you save your friend or the freezer full of frozen embryos? Most pick the friend.
Trolling is a art,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cord_blood
Thanks to the embargo on stem cell research, someone is making a fortune off nervous new parents by storing this stuff just in case something awful happens. Graaarrr.
there is no need to sign your posts. this isn't usenet. your username is right there above your post. stop it.
So you extract stem cells from an embryo, and allow the embryo to come to term, so now you have a baby and a stem cell line. The baby grows up. What rights does this person have over the stem cell line? Can they demand (e.g.) that the cells be used only thereputically, not for research? Can they charge a licensing fee to use them?
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
I often run across the assertion that many viable embryos, suitable for harvesting stem cells, would actually have been "medical waste" otherwise. Can somebody confirm or deny this? and back it up with references?
If true, it kinda makes the extreme right a bit hypocritical, doesn't it? Kinda like saying you refuse to sacrifice one life for the sake of another while maintaining a war in the mid-east....but I digress.
A goal is a dream with a deadline
Feminists for Life of America would completely shatter the grandparent poster's parody script (which was quite funny IMO). There are a lot of pro-lifers out there who don't bomb clinics, adopt kids, and who believe strongly in societal safety nets for the working and poor class.
Pro-life liberals outnumber pro-life conservatives but they get almost no press.
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
And here's some FAA guidelines to prevent people from bringing liquids onto planes, which will prevent[2] terrorists from hijacking or destroying a plane in flight!
The funny thing is that Ann Coulter actually agrees with you.
That makes no sense at all.
People who are "pro-life" are also "anti-choice" it's true, but the opposite end of the spectrum isn't actually true; the "pro-choice" people aren't "anti-life" at all.
Abortion isn't something women do for recreation, it's a very major life choice. One side beleives a woman doesn't have a right to make a choice, and that having an abortion is evil, while the other side beleives that no matter how evil abortion is or isn't, that taking away a womans right to make that choice is the greastest evil of them all.
Also, while the objection of President Bush and other moderates is killing the embryo, the Catholic Church and real "right wing zealot" Protestants have another deeper objection: the separation of sex and procreation. The idea is that it is fundamentally disordered to separate the two, as we have done since the 1930s. There is an analogous separation of eating and nutrition - also enabled by modern technology. While the Catholic Church has not said anything (that I know of) about the food angle, it is less emotionally charged and may help understand the reasoning concerning sex and procreation (described in full jargon laden glory in The Theology of the Body and various attempts to explain it to laymen).
Technology enables us to separate eating and nutrition. You can eat without nourishment thanks to Olestra, Aspartame, Sucralose, and friends. You can nourish without eating thanks to IVs, vitamin pills (get your necessary nutrients while eating junk food), feeding tubes, and friends. You can justify the nourishment without eating in various special circumstances - but the attempt to repeat the pleasure of eating beyond the requirements of nourishment is gluttonly and has generally bad results.
Similarly, the attempt to repeat the pleasure of sex beyond the needs of procreation (birth control, gay lifestyle, etc) has generally bad results - physical, emotional, and spiritual.
So you guys are stepping up and adopting all the unwanted babies? And you're working to reduce the social/societal consequences on young unwed mothers who carry children to term?
I'm pro-choice, but I do think there is a negative moral angle on abortion. I don't think any truly advanced society should have a place for abortion; education, contraception, and societal support for young mothers should completely remove the need for any such thing.
But you know what? The same right wing that preaches so hard against abortion, also preaches against practical sex ed, available contraception for minors, and social services for unwed mothers...not to mention the moral stigma they attach to young unwed mothers.
So don't talk about how you're adopting some of the babies who actually got born...That's the smallest part of what you need to be doing.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Look, I'm not going to go around and pretend like our current US President is doing a great job. But it's tiring to see a supposedly intelligent, educated base like Slashdot fall for the Democrat propaganda machine.
Under Clinton, you couldn't do any research on ESC using federal funds-- at all. This is a bill that Clinton signed into law in 1995. In fact, Bush's rules are less stringent than Clinton's, and yet all we do is demonize Bush for his stance on stem cells. Why is that?
There are a lot of us crazy Christian conservatives who are against:
1) abortion
2) IVF
3) death penalty
4) war
5) George W. Bush
6) the Republican Party, which has gone off the deep end
There just don't seem to be enough of us to rival the rest of the voting population.
The masses are the crack whores of religion.
First of all, you're unnecessarily limited in thinking that killing humans is a "fundie" issue. Most non-materialists have a problem with it.
Second, you should distinguish between the set of issues that Dr. Evil, I mean, Karl, use to whip up support, and the set of issues that religious / non-materialist persons care about. For example, Christian's care[d] about killing humans before, while, and after the Republicans use it to get people to go vote.
Not doing evil things is a religious (or as you say, "fundies") / non-materialist issue. Getting people to vote Republican is a Karl Rove issue. If you think they're the same, you're exactly the kind of chump that Karl tries to manipulate to the voting booth.
I call bullshit. You clearly have never had a kid, because the absolute first instinct is to go for the kids. Rationality never even enters into the picture.
And frankly, it's much easier to carry two kids than one adult.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
It is always amazing that given the incentive, science always finds a way to work through the requirements if the application is worth working on.
It is also amazing that we make them work through the requirements at all. It would also be amazing what they could have done if their work had not been bureaucraticly retarded for how many years now? At least they did manage to do it. Give thanks.
Bless Dr Lanza
Nice rhetoric, but the truth is, most of the people that are anti-abortion do support groups (with their $$$ and time) that aide young unwed mothers, providing health care and adoption services if needed. They get almost no press for it because, surprise surprise, the good that people do almost never gets covered-- the press prefers mean and nasty to helpful and compasionet.
I'm agnostic and pro-choice, but I have friends that are christian and pro-life, and they, more than anyone else I've seen in the issue, put their money where there mouth is and actually try to help people. And adopting unwanted children that would otherwise grow up in foster care, is far from a small thing. And tell me, have you done anything as selfless as that?
Anonymous Coward wrote: I flush viable human genetic material away all the time.
There is such a thing as TOO MUCH INFORMATION.
American Right to Life, you're correct. Roman Catholic Seamless Garment of Life, well, that's a different animal.
Ok, so this actually does address the Pope's main concern, and reduces stem cell donation to no different than kidney donation. Thus, as a Roman Catholic, I'm ethically satisfied. But the science half is still dissatisfied: What, exactly, does this get us? As we've been arguing all along, unless by some chance you have an exact DNA, RNA, and Mitochondrial match with a living human being who has a disease, the embryonic stem cell is likely to turn into tissue rejection upon growing & implantation. Where Adult Stem Cells don't have that problem. And now that we've even got brain neuron regeneration from adult brain stem cells in the pipeline, exactly what is this discovery good for again?
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
What part of "pro-choice" was unclear to you? I'm not in the business of telling anyone what to do with their body. I think abortions have a negative moral component, but I think a lot of things have a negative moral component, and I'm generally not in favor of frivolous laws governing behavior that is not detrimental to society.
And, for the record, screaming "Rape and Incest" in a discussion about abortion, is like screaming "Nazis" whenever you're talking about war. You're not adding anything to the discussion.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
the grandparent poster's parody script (which was quite funny IMO)
Actually it was meant to explore the issue and it has fostered a debate of sorts. The problem, from where I live, is a community crammed with children where social programs have been slashed, education is underfunded and the cost of living is very high. People who do insist upon populating the earth and saving every embryo need to do more than just adopt, they need to do ensure society has a place for them and has the necessary services in place, otherwise they will be debating where the build the next prison to house them as adults.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
The Signal/Noise ratio can be improved in two ways. Remaining silent is the OTHER way.
Nice rhetoric, but church-funded social services are not the answer, they are part of the problem.
This is an area where secular services are needed...We know the churches views on contraception ("Abstinence is good enough for anyone"), sex education ("Don't have sex until you're married, and don't enjoy it or you'll go to hell"), and on adoption ("Even though you're a slut and a whore for having this baby, we'll be willing to take it away from you and raise it to be the sort of kid that you're not").
Frankly, what this issue needs more than anything else is for the goddamn moralists to take a step back. This is a practical problem: women are getting pregant who don't want to be pregnant. There are practical solutions: help women not to get pregnant unless they want to be pregnant. This means education, and healthcare, and a whole bunch of things that the chruch cannot and will not provide.
If we provide these things, the numbers of abortions will decline, and isn't that the fricking point?
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
The bolding was done by me.
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
What part of "practical" do you not understand? You'll never be able to keep everyone who doesn't want a child right away from having sex. The closest you can get involves a lot of repression, social stigmas and a host of other side-effects. That's where the whole practical thing comes into play. It is IMpractical to try to force behavior onto people when it goes against one of their most fundamental drives. Witness Catholic schoolgirls and the failure of abstinence-only sex ed.
There are other means that are much more effective. Supposedly fifty percent of teenagers who take an abstinence vow have sex within the subsequent year.
The choice isn't between pregnancy and abstinence. It's between pregnancy, spending a bit of money on contraceptives, and abstinence. But if people don't know where to get contraceptives, they will not have the third option.
So now it's the teenage "live-forever-no-consequences" instinct against the prohibitions instilled by their parents, who quite obviously had sex. How do you expect it to turn out? And do you want one mistake to dominate a person's whole life? Or even simply derail it for a year? Because you don't want people to wear a piece of rubber?
Right. Cause screaming "ABSTAIN! ABSTAIN!" has worked OH so well so far.
How about a realistic approach? How about telling kids "Abstinence is the only 100% effective way to prevent pregnancy and STDs, and it'd be great if you practiced it. However, that's probably unrealistic, and so here are some ways to protect yourself if you do choose to have sex."
Because, you know, many of them WILL choose to. And which would you rather have? Pregnant teenagers with untreated STDs because they don't know fuck-all about protection and are too ashamed to go and get treatment when they get sick, or teenagers who're at least armed with the information to make an informed choice, and who might avoid some heartace (or worse)?
Abstinence is great, but teaching abstinence only does NOT work.
Since I can't tell them apart, I treat all ACs as the same person.
happynews.com
What is the negative moral angle? A truly advanced society shouldn't be basing its moral imperatives on rhetoric which doesn't distinguish between various stages of life, such as gamete/embryo/fetus/child (much less the various stages of embryonic development). This "negative angle" which you conceive of is merely the result of a group of ignorant fanatics attempting to put undue guilt on women who are faced with the already difficult choice of whether or not to fully carry a pregancy to term.
The fact that pro-lifers often equivocate abortion to murdering children, and paint pro-choicers to be pro-abortion, or advocating abortion, should show that their argument is fundamentally flawed. If you concede that aborting a pregancy is morally wrong, then what of morning-after pills as a contraceptive option which prevents a pregnancy even after the egg has been fertilized? And what about masturbation? When you carry the logic further based on their false premises, you can come to all sorts of absurd conclusions. Accidents will always happen no matter how advanced a society is. And the fact is, having a child should be a planned out decision, and a woman should have the right to abort an unplanned pregnancy if she has no desire to bear a child.
What is immoral is persecuting women who make a choice about what to do with their bodies realizing that bearing a child is a life-changing event that can't be undone. This persecution can be as extreme as blowing up abortion clinics, or it could be in the form of taking away access to contraceptive drugs, or it could even be passive persecution in the form of placing guilt on young women who have abortions or have ever considered having an abortion. This guilt leads a lot of women to make choices that are not in their best interest and create more social problems that arise from these poorly made decisions. Thus, calling abortion immoral has the same consequences as relating it to murder.
Cells from the Blastocyst are totipotent, they can become any other cell. "Stem" cells from an adult are multipotent, the types of cells they can become are more limited.
There is also the issue of that ol'Hayflick limit, cells from an adult are 'older', they have a more limited number of times they can duplicate themselves before errors start showing up. Each time an adult cell divides, it's telomoric DNA gets shorter, and short telomeres lead to increases in copying errors (aka somatic mutations). Cells from the blastocyst ("embryonic cells") still make telomerase, which repairs the telomeres. Adult cells don't (unless they are cancerous, but we don't want them8-0).
This is one big problem with adult stem cells as cures for older folks, older folks have cells that have been duplicated many more times than younger adults, their 'stem cells'; if you grow their cells outside of their body to make new organ tissue, the resulting organ tissue is even 'older' (has been duplicated more times) than the patient's original organ tissue. Thus a new heart grown from an adult's stem cells will likely have a shorter lifespan than the person from whom the stem cells came.
When the country falls into chaos, politicians talk about 'patriotism'. Lao-Tzu
Without committing myself to a particular level of pro-[choice|life]-ness, I would disagree with the upper ("more moral") end of your chart for a few reasons:
(1) Hair-splitting: Incest shouldn't be a separate category here. Either it's Rape of a Minor, assuming one of the parties -can't- consent, or it's Rape if one of the parties -doesn't- consent, or it's just icky consensual brother-sister stuff. I never understood why it's always trotted out like it's a whole new category.
(2) Life of the mother, in my opinion, is a much more compelling reason for termination than anything to do with rape (assuming the two don't overlap).
You have to have available birth control because a percentage of young people will gleefully start having sex as soon as their hormones kick into gear...No amount of education will stop this. This will also help adults make intelligent decisions about reproduction.
And when I say education, I mean education. I don't mean "teach abstinence". I mean "this is sex, this is what goes on, this is what you can catch, and this is how you can do it safely." I'm talking a significant course here, not just a day out of gym class.
The only way to help people make the right descision, is to make sure they have access to all the information. They may go through the whole class and not learn a damn thing, but they have a much better chance than if you'd tried to keep them in ignorance all along.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
I addressed this in my post at the end of it.
Objecting to unfettered experimentation on human subjects by researchers without any concern for the well-being of the subjects? Perfectly valid, and I'd be one of those shouting against such research.
Superstitious objections based on "My holy book says you can't use the color red" and similarly flimsy/absurd arguments? Should be ignored.
There's a middle ground between these two extremes, however, where the line is not so clear. At that point, discussion and debate and inquiry need to take place. And yes, while that discussion and debate and inquiry happens, some people will die, and that's very unfortunate. However, I think it would be much more unfortunate for humanity to completely abandon any sense of ethics in the pursuit of progress.
How many lives can be saved by having a treatment come a little sooner? I don't know. How many lives would be spent if we had a society hell-bent on progress with no regard for human life? I don't know, but the 20th century gives us some pretty damn good estimates...
I disagree with the notion that embryo == full-fledged human being, but as I said in my previous post, disagreeing with someone does not mean that I cannot understand and respect their views if their views are sensible, self-consistent and based at least somewhat on reality. I will not dismiss someone as an idiot if they say they have a moral objection to destroying embryos during research. I would dismiss someone as an idiot if they say "Well, you're not killing babies anymore, but now you're playing god, so stop it!" I would also dismiss someone as an idiot and a monster if they were to say that *ANY* restrictions on research should be removed.
Since I can't tell them apart, I treat all ACs as the same person.
I'm not demonizing anyone.
However, I do believe that the bulk of our societies sex issues have a religious root, and I don't think that adding more religion is the answer, especially since their method of dealing with the problem is basically to deny it exists until a child is born.
The first step is to slow down the number of unwanted pregnancies, and that takes education, and that takes contraception, and since the church is anti-sex ed, and opposed to providing any form of contraception, and only promotes the use of abstinence/"Please god don't let me get pregnant", I don't see how getting them more involved is going to help in any way.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Having more kids cheapens life all by itself. When the supply increases, the price goes down.
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
Technechly, all body cells have two sets, so should all cells be protected? I know that seems silly, but the issue I am pointing out is can you really call something a seperate organism if it cannot, in any way, live outside in another organism? If you remove an embryo from a mother, it would die, just like if it were skin cells you scraped off. Also, if the mother is not in good condition for some reason (injury, malnutrion, ect.), the body will get rid of it, causing a miscarrage. It is totally dependent, and therefore, IMO, it isn't a life yet, just another part of the woman carrying it.
Also, no matter what you do, women will have abortions by inducing miscarrages, often in unhealty ways. By making it illegal, you are trading potential lifes for actually lifes of women everywhere.
I give bread to the poor, they call me a saint.
I ask why the poor have no bread, they call me a communist.
Preaching abstinence is not the answer. It doesn't work. They already know they're not supposed to be having sex...hell, that's probably one of the reasons they're doing it! And if you don't tell them anything besides "Don't have sex" you haven't taught them anything about how to be safe when they actually do have sex. And they will! It's a sad specimen that goes through life with no sex, and very few people wait until after marriage these days.
And economics? To minors who think that money is something you ask your dad for more of? I don't think that'll be a compelling argument.
I don't have problems with those things being taught, but they should be only a small part of the total lesson. Those kids should be taught about sex, they should be taught about rape, they should be taught about many different kinds of birth control AND HOW TO USE THEM. They should be taught about abortions, and how to make sure you don't need one. STDs, abuse, health issues, legal issues, the works, all the stuff that we had to learn the hard way.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
And my metric is what the embryo/fetus is biologically capable of at that point of development. The human reproductive cycle is well understood and the biology behind it has been extensively studied. Consciousness in the context I was using it in refers to the state of being sentient. Being asleep or "unconscious" does not mean that one is braindead or has lost sentience.
Also, even though gametes are the only haploid cells in a human being, that doesn't mean they don't possess a full set of chromosomes which are expressed in a human being (the monoploid number in humans is the same as the haploid number). If you want to say that gametes aren't human beings because they are haploid cells, then what about a culture of tongue cells or any of the many other types of diploid cells in the human body which can live in vitro and grow and reproduce?
Why not make the distinction based on the abundance of other biological characteristics which are different between embryos and a 3rd-trimester fetus? Or on more fundamental differences such as cognitive capacity or biological complexity?