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Stem Cells Generated From Adult Cells
DrJay writes "Scientist report that introducing only four genes to adult cells is sufficient to convert them to something that looks and acts remarkably like an embryonic stem cell. Although some of the details need to be worked out, if this technique is generally applicable, it may allow the production of an essentially unlimited supply of stem cells. There is a subscription-only report, and Ars Technica's science journal describes the results in some detail for those without subscriptions."
Now, instead of killing embryos for research, all those fertility clinics storing embryos can keep them alive until they throw them out! Hooray!
Push Button, Receive Bacon
Couldnt they just mix:
Adult Cell (Sperm)
Adult Cell (Egg)
give it a couple weeks and viola, Stem Cells.
There you have it, stem cells grown from adult cells. Who could have issue with that?
Profit to follow.
I think that those who find some moral problem involved with stem cells -- particularly after the discoveries made public yesterday about the non-destructive method of obtaining stem cells -- is kidding themselves about the history of medicine. We would know very little about what makes us tick if human dissections, made possible in many cases by professional grave-robbers, had not taken place in defiance of the religious objections of the day. If adult stem cells can be made useful, that's fine. But experiments with embryonic stem cells remain irreplaceable, and still more likely useful medically. Of course, we don't know for sure, because the research hasn't been DONE.
If we're going to get all squeamish about research and pander to the wishes of one or another religious group at this point in advanced human society, we're going to have to consent to genetic diseases that will have no cure, to diseases evolving to the point that they overwhelm the 19th-century germ science and early-20th-century antibiotics that we have to use against them, and generally to life falling back to the level of the 14th century. Not me.
Frankly, I find it completely bizarre for such tender-hearted regard to be extended to a blob of blastocysts that may produce a human being if everything goes right, while we approach the rest of humanity with the weapons of terror and elimination. Oh, you Christianists. Oh, wait, Christianity is a Religion of Peace, right? It's just a few that spread this terror and superstition.