Slashdot Mirror
Skin Cells Turned Embryonic
anik315 writes "Nature is reporting a major breakthrough in embryonic stem cell research. A straightforward procedure using mouse fibroblasts harvested from the skin can be used to produce pluripotent stem cells that can potentially become any other cell in the body. Not only can Yamanaka's method use the most basic cells, it can be accomplished with simple lab techniques. Possible applications of this breakthrough are to check molecular changes in cells as certain conditions develop. Stem cells produced using this procedure, however, can not be used safely to make genetically matched cells for transplant."
Almost every cell has the complete dna (gametes excluded), so it stands to reason this would be possible at some point or another.
The embryos are all protected by law, so this technology means they're going to be coming after us adults!
Soylent Green is made from people!
Downside: Now we can clone Cowboy Neal by sampling his keyboard.
A Good Troll is better than a Bad Human.
Just a few more years and it should be possible to cause fibroblasts to grow into embryos. IRC, it's more or less possible now but it involves mixing and matching parts of different cells (the nucleus from the fibroblast and the cytoplasm from a fertilized egg cell.
Anyway, that should throw the anti-abortion crowd for a loop: "Oh no, he's cut his skin. He's killing babies!" After all, the usual argument is that if something can develop into a human then it should be considered to be a human even before it develops into a human.
Is there a word for biological vaporware ? I've seen so many claims likke this lately.
Yep! Peeling the flesh off of living humans is a huge improvement.
Actually it is. We have already been using skin grafts to cure minor cosmetic flaws from burns or scars with no moral repercussions. I don't see why it would suddenly become immoral to expand that to much more life-threatening diseases and ailments.
Well, back to rejecting software patent applications.
A straightforward procedure using mouse fibroblasts harvested from the skin can be used to produce pluripotent stem cells [...] Stem cells produced using this procedure, however, can not be use to safely to make genetically matched cells for transplant.
I think I found the source of the problem.
A legparnasom tele van angolnaval.
If stem cells were actually dead babies, that flamebait of yours might make some sort of sense.
I disagree, dead babies is always the answer.
Actual papers for those interested (it was published simultaneously by three groups): (Nature probably requires subscriptions, the first one is free access)
e xt?uid=PIIS1934590907000203
t /full/nature05934.html
t /full/nature05944.html
Nimet Maherali, Rupa Sridharan, Wei Xie, Jochen Utikal, Sarah Eminli, Katrin Arnold, Matthias Stadtfeld, Robin Yachechko, Jason Tchieu, Rudolf Jaenisch, Kathrin Plath, and Konrad Hochedlinger
http://www.cellstemcell.com/content/article/fullt
Keisuke Okita, Tomoko Ichisaka & Shinya Yamanaka
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurren
Marius Wernig, Alexander Meissner, Ruth Foreman, Tobias Brambrink, Manching Ku, Konrad Hochedlinger, Bradley E. Bernstein & Rudolf Jaenisch
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurren
Are we finally looking at a slash in hotdog manufacturing costs?!
Who needs high tech when your skin cells can turn you into a bionic person. I just can't wait for the IPO!
The ONLY way to make sure that never happens... Nuke it from space!
Dammit, and I've been stockpiling dead babies for years waiting for the government to finally start funding embryonic stem cell research. I've got a whole garage full of them, what am I supposed to do now?
Seriously, this is not a scientific question, but a moral/ philosophical question. There IS room for debate. However, as a promising source of embryonic stem cells, this discovery may reduce the importance of the debate. I think that the abortion debate in general should be solved in this way. Make the debate less important by solving the problem of unwanted pregnancies directly with good birth control.
A Good Troll is better than a Bad Human.
They claim they can reprogram cells with only 4 factors. The system only "correctly" reprograms a small percentage of cells.
They use a new technique that adds antibiotic resistance near markers for what they consider the properly reprogrammed cells. Antibiotics are used to kill off the baddies.
The fact that nearly 1/4 of the lines go on the form cancer, indicates the reprogramming is far for perfect.
Methylation Errors? Errors somewhere else in the chromatin? Something from the retroviruses they use to do some of the heavy lifting? Something we don't know (of many, many things) of other epigenetic mechanisms when gametes aren't involved?
In any case it sounds like interesting progress. In the end, science will end the political controversy, as we gain understanding, we will be able to turn any cell into any other cell. Embryos can rot in the bin, we won't need them given time.
> After all, the usual argument is that if something can develop into a human then it should be considered to be a human even before it develops into a human.
Not quite. You need to take better note of the verb tense. It's that if something is developing into a human, then it should be considered as human beforehand.
Well, except for the issue with the "human" part. Because we all know it's a living homo sapien. If you disagree, exactly what species is that embryo, blastocyst, or fetus? The only question is when it has a soul^W err, mind, personality and intellect worth preserving with legal force.
Okay, now you can go into flamewar mode over whether or not that's speciesist (handy hint: adding -ist or -ism automagically makes it wrong!) Won't someone please think of the great apes?
... when I hear it's been replicated at a few dozen labs.
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
Why are they running these experiments on mouse cells? Why aren't they starting with human skin cells and developing their techniques there? It would avoid the secondary step of having to transfer the technique from mouse tissue to human tissue.
I always assumed that the reason that experiments are done on mice and other animals is that they are easier to obtain than human subjects and that we can do things to them that would be considered unethical when done to a human (leaving aside some people's feelings that they are unethical when done to animals too).
But with skin cell experiments, I don't see the reason to do the research on animals. Human skin cells ought to be readily available, ethical to obtain, and ethical to experiment on.
Why start with mice on this? Why not start with humans and cut one step out of the process?
Sure, but the same people who are the biggest advocates against abortion also tend to be the ones that seek to limit access to birth control, so that argument doesn't get very far either.
"The four transcription factors used by Yamanaka reprogramme cells inconsistently and inefficiently, so that less than 0.1% of the million cells in a simple skin biopsy will be fully reprogrammed."
As noted, the major problem is not just the inconsistency, but the locating of the modified cells.
However, unlike many other slashdot articles, this is is in a peer-reviewed journal, it is based on a technique which has been run for a while and altered based upon other followup work, and it might prove a useful addition for labs to do research, while of limited use in therapeutics.
But that also depends on cost. People forget that a successful research lab has got to get costs per experiment down - if it costs me $20 per sample and I have a plate of samples, I'll go broke trying to run any sizeable research of any note, especially that with significant data that can answer more than 2 basic questions of statistical significance.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Time to sell my stock shares in abortion clinics.
You can't take the sky from me.
As a cell ages, divides, ages some more, there is a particular section (damned if I can remember which) that shortens till it reaches a point that the cell is somehow considered too old and dies off. So, making stem cells from skin cells may have the effect of developing pre-aged cells. I wonder if that has been considered or addressed.
??? Irrelevant. The advocacy of others does not imply a weakness in my argument.
A Good Troll is better than a Bad Human.
Well, you could always make a pizza joint out of them.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
I meant the argument doesn't get very far in the real world debate because the people you are debating with have these views against birth control as well, not that it is logically flawed in any way.
Might it make the difference between "in theory" and "in practice"?
Looks like your site got nuked from space. --
A Good Troll is better than a Bad Human.
Frankly, I think we should do it just out of spite... for people who would spout the kind of self-important ignorant garbage that just evacuated itself from the barren environment of your skull.
When studied, it was discovered that very low level DC currents were measured throughout the body and at the wound area on tested salamander. Later tests determined that artificially stimulating the cells with DC current triggered the cells to de-differentiate.
Interesting!
Even more interesting, the cells of more complex organisms, (humans), also react to low level DC current, and in fact, naturally occurring DC current plays a role in the normal growth and healing cycles of cells. All manner of tests have been performed, leading to a variety of strange discoveries, such as the finding that human cancer cells increase their growth rate by several orders of magnitude when exposed to electrical fields.
Why has this never been studied in depth? Well, the multi-billion dollar cancer and stem cell research industry would be upset if new and simple knowledge were to come to light. Conspiracy theory? Who cares. Salamanders can re-grow arms and nobody in the main-stream scientific community seems to have bothered to look at this closely. Apparently, the scientific explanation for how Salamanders do this is slip-shod at best; the semi-official explanation is that Salamander cells don't really de-differentiate, but rather, somehow, new stem cells migrate through the blood to the region of the wound. (This by people who have not actually looked at the puzzle closely, but who would lose stem cell research grant money if it were accepted that Salamander cells can do the 'impossible' (de-differentiate). How's that for the grand and noble scientific community?
You can read all about this, and all manner of other fascinating elements of electromagnetics as they relate to biological life in Robert O. Becker's book on the subject.
Incidentally, EM from cell phones and powerlines is covered in some depth, and several mechanisms by which low-power EM pollution can have a profound impact on living tissues, and the nervous system.
Typically, however, most people don't like to hear stuff like that as it means their cell phones and WiFi and other beloved toys are suddenly suspect. Awww.
-FL
They wasted a billion on Embryonic Stem Cell Research.
Stupid!
Leave it to the market to decide, they find cheaper and better solutions over the long run.
Bush was right but for the wrong reasons (has a tendency to be that way the few times he is right).
Why not start with human cells, thus saving the effort of transferring the techniques later?
A bit like saying why deploy changes onto a test system instead of straight onto the live system - after all, you'll only have to migrate to live later?
There are too many things that could go wrong - I'm not a molecular biologist, but I guess it's possible that if cells are persuaded to change their pattern of development (by switching on/off certain areas of the DNA, in a process that is not fully understood), a set of cells that briefly become, say, liver cells, could switch again to something altogether less benign? A tumour, say? Or maybe something that could spread and infect other regions of the body, or other people?
I'm sure a proper specialist could think of more plausible potential problems - but the point is, it's seriously unproven technology, and experimenting on humans would be highly unethical.
If DNA is like a library of code, would you install on your own system patches with lots of unknown and untested system calls, that you'd got from some site on the net?
Unless you run windows update, I guess ;-)
Paul "Say no to feeping creaturism"
the same people who are the biggest advocates against abortion also tend to be the ones that seek to limit access to birth control, so that argument doesn't get very far either.
Sure it does, if reasonable people can ignore the others. The problem is unwanted pregnancy and reasonable people can work together to reduce it and support the people who have the problem. The use of obnoxious and confused advocates is an underhanded way to kill off a proposal.
The counterexamples are communists, extreme feminists and corporate monsters who put production above personal well being. They don't value babies because they don't value each other.
You don't have to be religious or hate sex to think that abortion is murder. In almost all cases, if no one does anything to a pregnant woman, a child will be born. The person who stops that birth has ended a human life. It is a terrible thing to do and it is not justified by other terrible things, lack of resources or potential uses for the remains.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
I love the irony of your post. I wish I believed it was intentional.
Wow! If this technique is researched further, it may not be necessary to use embryonic stems cells any more. This sounds good on many levels, and will probably make both sides of the argument happy.
I know TFA says that these cells cannot be transplanted into a patient, it is too dangerous. I wonder if improvements in the technique could lower these dangers to an acceptable level however...after all, embryonic stem cells are in the same boat as far as I know.
it can develop into a baby, and that it already is a human
I thought it was a cat. No?
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Of course, I was just being facetious -- parodying the extreme and ludicrous characterization of embryonic stem cell research/therapy as involving "dead babies." Except that my description of the procedure is actually technically accurate (at least so far as I can tell, if it went beyond the animal testing stage). Of course, if you have to explain the joke, you've already failed as comedian. I apologize for my inept attempt at humor. :)
... about the only way that you can raise such concerns is to assume some sort of empirically unsupported vitalist superstition.
I have no problem with this technology or research, but then I also think there is no ethical dilemma with the use of embryonic stem cells for medical purposes/research either. I think it's ridiculous to say we have a moral obligation to a tiny clump of cells with no nervous system
The poster makes a serious ethical point.
However emotively he put it, surely it's quite different to take tissue from a consenting human donor than from a subject whose life has just been ended - however "potential" its (his? her?) humanity may be.
Don't all but the most extreme "it's the woman's body till it's born" zealots regard the abortion of a foetus (with its potential to grow into a human adult) as a necessary evil, rather than a simple lifestyle choice?
Paul "Say no to feeping creaturism"
Good solutions are usually no match for ignorance, incompetence and apathy. The very best birth control in the world still suffers from one singular and overarching problem; getting people to use it. This is made worse in some parts of the world by organizations (like the Vatican and the current US Administration) working against sound sexual practices out of some bizarre moral belief that distributing condoms and birth control pills makes the Judeao-Christian deity cry. Now I realize that the Vatican feels that it is protecting the dire commandments of its rather limited, seldom-seen and almost always utterly impotent deity (ie. YHVH should goddamn well prevent pregnancies itself rather than requiring Vatican officials spread lies about condom effectiveness), while the US Administration is pretty much a whore of some of the most delusional intellectual and moral deadbeats the Western world has managed to produce since the Reformation, but at some point someone is going to have to say "You're retards. Go fuck yourselves. You're laughing stocks who deserve nothing but universal revilement. You will go down in history as some of the most ignorant, self-important, know-nothing twerps produced by this sad species. You have about as much right to make statements on public health and morality as a dead TB-ridden rat with swollen rectal tissue leaking out its anterior."
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Either are stepped on the toes of some mental retard who defends the Bush administration, or on some good-for-nothing YHVH worshipper who can't face the fact that he worships delusions and his coreligionists are advocating health solutions that can only come from sick or low-IQ minds. I welcome such retarded fuckers to waste their moderator points on these posts. Go for it you stupid fucking bastards. Show how fucking stupid, how bereft of morality, brains or any cognitive or emotional capacity that could be considered mammalian, let alone human.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Either that or you'll wind up cloning a Cheeto.
I thought this article was going to be about Sepultura and their song "Dead Embryonic Cells" being some sort of inspiration for science. Maybe it was, the scientists just didn't want to cop to it.
How do you verify that someone has been taking their birth control?
How do you prevent people who are not eligible to have abortions because they wern't 'responsible' from having abortions anyway?
paintball
Unwanted pregnancies could also be solved by in vitro adoption and artificial incubation. I think most anti-abortion advocates would probably consider that a resonable compromise. At least the ones who honestly want to save the life of the child would. The relatively small (but vocal) minority of anti-abortion advocates who are just using it for political posturing, etc. won't, but at least they won't have that weapon in their political arsenal.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
In almost all cases, if no one does anything to a pregnant woman, a child will be born.
In almost all cases, an egg will die before becoming fertilized.
In almost all cases, sperm will die before fertilizing an egg.
In almost all cases, if no one does anything to an egg that has been fertilized outside of a woman, that egg will die.
Therefore, killing an embryo is OK, as if you left it sitting there it was going to die anyway, right?
paintball
> They want to punish women for having sex. Nothing more, nothing less.
Inventing evil motives for those who disagree with you is intellectually dishonest. I've yet to see even one pro-life person claim that as their motivation. Ever. Let alone all of them. If you can't disagree without inventing a reason to hate those who hold it, you are well outside the bounds of rational discourse.
There's a word to describe you: bigot.
Believe it or not, that word has an actual meaning, although I wonder if anyone knows what it means given how carelessly it gets thrown around these days.
OK, not exactly a third way, but there is a libertarian compromise that respects, as far as is practicable, both positions. (Granted, anyone who finds themselves in one camp or the other will disagree, but hear me out.) This compromise was worked out by Loyola professor Walter Block. It recognizes that abortion is two things: eviction of an unwanted intruder from a woman's body, and the murder of a unique human being. A woman has the perfect right to evict any intruder from her property, that is, her own body, at any time, for any reason. (Self-ownership is the first principle of liberty.) Block maintains that if the fetus can be evicted without killing it, there is a moral obligation to do so. To kill it when there are other avenues of eviction available is murder. Fetal viability comes into play, but not in the way that pro-lifers think: they think it has to be brought to term inside an unwilling woman's body once it is viable. Not so. Do a c-section and move the baby to an incubator. Happens all the time these days. Nor is anyone obligated to care for a baby so evicted, but people seem to be lining up to do just that, and good for them. Anyway, the paper is here.
That's the last time I run code posted in somebody's sig...
Why is the abortion debate involved in this at all? Stem cells used in research are not acquired from abortions! Abortions are a terrible source of stem cells for research purposes.
Creating a life to terminate is ghoulish to say the least, but it can be justified. Fertility treatments and research are both justification, as long as the practitioner is competent. As you point out, there's no practical way to keep all of the results alive.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Your first post had the beginnings of an argument (albeit, one I disagree with). You were moderated down because you went off into unnecessary personal attacks. Your second post was moderated down because you did the same.
The obvious answer is Choice! I for one want more choice. I say we let anyone decide what they want to do! Choose what works! Who am I to say if millions of people find Charles Manson's ways to be murder? He apparently doesn't think the humans he's killing are people. I say let him choose. We should fund his research too. With some federal tax dollars.
AC because I'm trying to be funny and prove a point, but someone might get bent out of shape.
Oh, fie. The only reason I cared about cloning was for the dead babies. Who doesn't love a good dead baby? http://www.dead-baby-joke.com/
crap.
the most vocal, and therefore the most influential anti-choice proponents claim that birth control for women is tantamount to abortion as most prevent the egg from adhering to the wall of the uterus, or prevent it from traveling down the fallopian tubes, where it can grow further. Condoms, therefore, can be the only one they can support, but those same supporters tend to be the ones who want to preach abstinence because their head seems firmly implanted in the sand, doomed to pretend people from kids to grandparents do not have sex or sexual urges (This mindset seems to be the biggest barriers against sexual education in youth.)
This is why the argument does not go far. The only ones who speak loudly enough to argue, tend to be the very evangelical of the crowd. That comes from firsthand experience at protests. Those very vocal people are quick to judge. Even at clinics where women who have gone through a non-induced miscarriage that was no fault of their own go to seek treatment afterwards, pro-life people stand and hurl insults at them, not knowing even a part of the story.
I support embryonic stem cell research, as I have Type 1 diabetes and stand to gain from this research. Most of the eggs used were discarded and would never have come to fruition as a human anyway.
First, if you would RTFS, much less article, much less paper, you would know that one of the fascinating things about this procedure is that it uses skin cells, not embryonic cells as a base. Very few people who believe in any invasive medicine have a problem with this. This is a breakthrough in part because it fixes problems like embryonic harvesting or even The Island-esqe people harvesting because a given sick person could use it on him or herself.
Secondly, a work force that lives productively into their 80's would be a lovely thing for any society's economies. A government should certainly be concerned about its nation's economy, yes?
Thirdly, medical research=good for people. Democratic government=group that uses pooled funds for betterness of group. Are there spending issues? Duh. But still better than most systems. I want to put my money in a pool that can fund science. Hooray that there is an automatic way that this happens for me. I don't even need said science to produce economic results for me to be happy about it. But if it's going to, I won't turn that down.
And for the record, a considerable majority of Americans do want stem cell research, even from embryos. Google news reports around last Nov's Missouri senate elections, & there were several stories about how while most Americans support it, it's a non-issue in the polls.
To answer your queries
1) It's worthwhile pursuing other avenues of research in case this avenue doesn't pan out
2) It's worthwhile pursuing other avenues of research that use stem cells from normal sources until this method is more reliable in producing the raw materials for those complementary avenues of research. Those other avenues of research also add to our understanding of cell differentiation which might provide positive feedback into your favoured avenues of research.
3) The pharmaceutical industry is a lot more interested in producing treatments than cures. You can make a lot more money out of an ongoing treatment than from a one shot cure. Private industry generally also isn't interested in funding multi-decade long term research projects but want much shorter time frame ROI. Even in the pharmaceutical industry, where safety testing causes development times that can exceed a decade, the amount of research that remains before these approaches can be commercially viable are too long to attract the necessary investment.
4)...
5) Keep your religious and capitalist ideology to yourself and out of the way of scientist trying to further our understanding of whether it's possible to make this work. Once we start havign a reasonable understanding the fine grain mechanisms of cell differentiation and start looking at widespread clinical trials, then you can bring out your hobby horse.
Laissez lire, et laissez danser; ces deux amusements ne feront jamais de mal au monde. - Voltaire
Now all we need is a bunch of over-religious nutters telling me that the skin on my ass is a child that hasn't been born, yet is entitled to all the rights of an individual.....
Maybe I'll even get to use the "Stem cells are people MY ASS!" line, and actually be correct on BOTH sides of the issue at the same time!
Knowing Google's lust for data collection, the Soviet Union is still alive and well inside the psyche of Sergey Brin....
Wow. The majority of this article's discussion are children of my -1 troll first post. Not bad, I'd say. Give his some mod points.
A Good Troll is better than a Bad Human.
Cure for HIV
...
1. Find person A naturally immune to HIV.
2. Find person B with HIV.
3. Create stem cells for person B.
4. Copy the gene that makes A immune to HIV into B's stem cells.
5. Find a way to turn the stem cells into red bone marrow.
6. You now have red bone marrow for person B that will generate white blood cells that are immune to HIV.
7
8. Profit!
Posting as AC since I'm to lazy to get an account
Yes, that ought to be pleasant. I can see it now, 2 million 640k and balmer chair jokes per hour, ACK!
what is the justification for using public money for research that tens of millions of people consider murder?We hope this is so, but have absolutely no way of knowing.
Additionally, no stem-cell research that I know of is focused on any public health concern such as communicable diseases; rather, it is focused on private health issues such as cancer or Parkinson's disease. Hence, it is debatable whether such research is the domain of government at all.First off, I'm not sure I buy your proclamation (where are the tens of millions fighting against in-vitro fertilization). Tens of millions also consider eating animals tantamount to murder...let's kill off the USDA. Tens of millions believe in creationism, let's stop geology/archeology/cosmology research. Tens of millions of people believe lots of crazy shit that should not be directing gov't policy, thats the way democracy works.
1. *That* you know of. Even the researchers don't really know how widely stem-cell therapy might or might not be used, that's why you research it. 2. So you are positing that only those lucky enough to have suffered from a communicable disease should be a concern of the gov't? Really? And what defines a public health concern? Cancer from industrial pollution? vCJD from mad-cows...that happens to be similar to parkinson's (and alzheimer's)? So people who had the unfortunate luck to be born with a disease are SOL, yet those with preventable sexually-transmitted diseases are the beneficiaries? What the hell kind of moral system did you pluck that from?
If the government is going to intrude so deeply into the private sphere, should it not do so under only the most benign of manners?Right, so how about, say, abortion? Or euthanasia? Should the gov't butt out of those 'private spheres'? And if so, you've lost the support of those "tens of millions" who have an issue with stem-cell research.
In contrast, there is no compelling reason for the government to fund stem-cell research at all...and even less so, given its controversy.Well, public support for gov't funding of research is a pretty damn compelling reason. Again, democracy and all. If you can convince a majority to do away with basic research funding, then we can have a debate about the societal benefit of gov't support of research. Until then, we, as a society, have pretty clearly decided that it is in our interest to support research (of non-communicable diseases as well as stem-cell related technology).
-Ted
-=-=- Quantum physics - the dreams stuff are made of.
With so many ways a vegetarian can get proper nutrition, is there any reason why we should publicly fund a practice that millions of people consider murder? All publications from the FDA should be rewritten to exclude meat as a potential source of food. All meat certifications and health inspections should cease. After all, the government has no business funding meat research at all... and even less so, given its controversy.
Still want to change your government's policy to pander to an irrational minority?
Just because a disease is non-communicable doesn't make it a "private health issue" and thus unworthy of public funding. By it's very nature disease itself is a public health issue (i.e it affects the public). Cancer is one of the leading causes of death in the US population and I'm sure that those people who are diagnosed with it are glad their tax dollars are going towards researching a cure. Also note that stem cell research isn't about cloning people, one of the primary goals of stem cell research is the idea of growing entire organs/limbs from your own cells so that they are genetically matched. Breakthroughs in this field would be a huge boon to public health.
What? A skin cell can become an embryos and you think that there's nothing that comes to mind. Scratching ones arm is equivalent to genocide. In fact, the only thing cost us these precious lives is womb space. There's no excuses. All unoccupied wombs are murder!
It is no longer uncommon to be uncommon.
What else are dead babies good for? ... besides eating that is... :)
I'm a bit sceptical about this, as a previous claim to turn adult bone marrow into stem cells, by Catherine Verfaille, later turned out to be impossible to reproduce. A critical article appeared in Nature, as well as a more popular article (in German).
Is it really a troll though? I think our President was right to stick to his guns and veto short term morally questionable hacks like embryonic stem cells. He may not be a man of science, but he is a man of God and his religious faith was enough to tell him sacrificing all those poor babies to allow a few godless heathens to avoid going to hell for a few months is a bad idea. If they were good Christians they would know that the Lord will reward them with eternity in paradise after they die.
Oh wait, nevermind.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
Yep... very very true. As a side note, the same anti-abortion proponents also appear to be the same kind of people who are strongly in favor of death penalty, and usally supporters of war too, so ordinary logic doesn't apply here... why "killing" an embryo should be more criminal than killing a living person?
--
"The crux of the biscuit is the Apostrophe(*)" - FZ
Yeah, damn straight.
I think there is something a bit morally questionable about really late abortions. Mind you, I'd fix it by making early abortions really easy to get. E.g. make pills like RU486 over the counter and allow surgical abortion on demand.
Incidentally, my Dad is a biologist and he reckons that your nervous system isn't wired up until a few months after birth, so even Roman style infanticide is not a problem morally from his point of view.
Now I don't think that the government should stop people having late abortions - I personally think it's questionable but I can see that it is subjective. But actually killing babies seems to be ok to criminalize.
So essentially I think stopping birth goes from completely OK at conception to wrong just after birth and the percentage wrongness level increases monotonically between the two. But this is subjective as I say, and it is possible that future discoveries may prove that the curve is different.
If I were a pro choice American for example, I think the curve would be somewhat similar to this, but if I were pro life it would be much steeper. Catholics for example seem to think that contraception and abortion are both wrong, though perhaps in practice abortion is more wrong than contraception. Come to think of it, I don't think their system of morality has this sort of curve, since it's not better to turn late abortions into early ones and early abortion into contraception.
I actually think this sort of subtlety is lost on people who base their morality on the laws of some obscure, Taliban like, tribe like the ones mentioned in the Old Testatment, Torah or the Quran.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
While your final line makes logical sense in the lab, it does not apply in the womb, nor does it apply to an organism that one creates for that purpose. There is a distinct moral difference between directly destroying life, and by inactivity failing to protect it. A simplified (but admittedly straw man) analogy would be to say that there is in fact a difference between allowing an acorn to be eaten by a squirrel, and cutting down a tree. Or more aptly, eating a fresh chicken egg vs killing a chicken. There is in fact a great difference between actively destroying life and allowing it to end, and while verbose arguments may soothe an individual's conscience, they do not erase moral or ethical implications.
The fact that there is any doubt whatsoever is what gives many of abortion's moral opponents issue with in vitro fertilization, as well. One need not share the view to comprehend it.
This entire issue seems to be clouded over by emotionalism. And admittedly the problem seems to be that most of those who publicly vocalize opinions on the issue are so polarized, usually pandering to one side or the other in hopes of gaining political support. Ultimately, the trouble with logical or technological answers to these issues is that those on both sides of the actual "debate" so deeply fear the end of the dispute itself.
someone should mod you up. Your correct, but it is the usual argument thrown out there by the anti-abortionists.
SWM seeks new sig for a brief fling
>I knew there was a better way than using dead babies.
So what happens when our tech is good enough to turn these fibroblasts into "dead babies"? Are you going to scream bloody murder and try to outlaw scratching oneself?
FTFAS: Stem cells produced using this procedure, however, can not be use to safely to make genetically matched cells for transplant.
So since this technology can't be used in the way that has the most benefit, it's useful exactly how? Not trying to be argumentative, just curious...
The obvious need is to regrow replacement organs like the heart, kidney, an arm, nerves, 12" pecker, etc. How can this new technology be used if it can't be used for organ replacement?
First, if you would RTFS, much less article, much less paper, you would know that one of the fascinating things about this procedure is that it uses skin cells, not embryonic cells as a base. Very few people who believe in any invasive medicine have a problem with this. This is a breakthrough in part because it fixes problems like embryonic harvesting or even The Island-esqe people harvesting because a given sick person could use it on him or herself.
/. left-of-center, all-techy-stuff-is-good wisdom?
You clearly misundestood my entire line of reasoning. Sorry for not being clearer. The research in this article is unquestionably moral. Assuming we are going to fund medical research in the first place, we SHOULD be funding this project and the dozens like it that are taking the high road. The fact that so many high roads are open (and their are so many other worthy destinations to travel to, such as global warming research, to pick something random) makes it a dubious argument that we must also simultaneously pursue the controversial "low road" to one of our targets.
Secondly, a work force that lives productively into their 80's would be a lovely thing for any society's economies. A government should certainly be concerned about its nation's economy, yes?
No. First, such reasoning could be used to justify anything, as "economy" is so broad as to be meaningless in this context. Second, what we generally mean by "economy" is just the sum of lots and lots of private matters. LOTS of private matters does not make something public.
Thirdly, medical research=good for people.
If the government decided what was "best for the people" was to cut out your kidneys to save the lives of two others, would you object? "Good for people" is a necessary but not sufficient condition for something to be in the domain of government.
And for the record, a considerable majority of Americans do want stem cell research, even from embryos.
That is what I am working on. Most of them are grossly mis-informed about the matter. Majorities often want stupid, impossible, or contradictory things.
Btw, here is a challenge to you: What makes my post a troll? I completely fail to see it? Is it because it contradicts the conventional
I will pay you ten to one that in 2030, there will be no major health-related treatments that are based on destroying human embryos.
Nazi researchers didn't know how long you could dunk someone in ice water before you could no longer save them. That is why they researched it.
I hate bringing out the N-bomb but you set yourself up for it totally.
Its great that they can do this in mice now, but at some point this stuff has to move beyond experimenting on animals and being tested on humans. I don't think I would jump up and down at the chance to be a human guinea pig, regardless of how promising this procedure may be. But I do hope they are able to continue their progress because it does seem to be a valuable technique down the road :/
I guess you MIGHT call that a bit of a downside. I don't know how many people trying to relieve some of their Parkinson's Disease or Diabetes symptoms are going to be cool with a 20% chance of "trading up" to cancer.
You know, after the first read of your comment I agreed with you. But after I thought about it, if I had Parkisons, which isn't as treatable as diabetes, I just might consider this new treatment as an alternative. At least some forms of cancer are treatable, and with the prior knowledge of a 20% chance of occurance, it would seem that doctors would be able to get a jump on treatment of the cancer. Tough call.
So, you went from the actually-advanced argument, "fetuses frequently miscarry naturally, so inducing a miscarriage isn't particularly unnatural", to pretending that the original poster said, "people die, so killing them in ways that have little or nothing to do with natural causes of death is morally right"?
It sure is easier to attack positions that your opponent doesn't actually hold, isn't it?
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
While religiosity is a good predictor of how patriarchal someone's views are, it's not the only predictor. The real drive is the belief that women who have sex deserve to be punished for it, and you don't have to be religious to think that--though it helps. I'd be interested in knowing what portion of people who oppose abortion hold misogynistic views as well.
For evidence of how bad-faith the anti-abortion movement is, there's always this handy-dandy chart.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Hint: the difference that you're looking for is the difference between "innocent" and "guilty". http://www.dictionary.com/ is your friend.
Then again, your wailing about "encourag[ing] promiscuity" and how those damned sluts deserve to be punished with unwanted pregnancies because, well, they were asking for it, what with the having sex and all, leads me to believe that your motives may not be that different.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Until it's possible, I don't think that can be posited as a solution. To my knowledge, the embryos will die.
You make good points, but waving your unverifiable qualifications around (after all, this is the internet; no one knows you're a Nobel Prize winner) doesn't help you. If you're a genius, show us with your blazingly incisive rhetoric. Any idiot can claim to have a Ph.D.; not everyone can put together a coherent argument to support their point. Doing the latter is worth far more than doing the former.
(If you're going to ask how you should have responded to the assertion that you're an incompetent human being, if not by claiming credentials for yourself, the answer is that it's not worth responding to. It's just an ad hominem; it doesn't contain anything of worth.)
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
I think that the grandparent poster is aware that "Star Trek" characters are fictional, which puts him way past religious folks who've historically taken their fandom so seriously that they've set people on fire because of it.
Also, "a unique set of DNA" is an incredibly stupid definition of human. From that point of view, a chimera is two people; a set of identical twins is one person. These are not in fact hypothetical situations; in them, we consider a chimera to be one person, and identical twins to be two. Conjoined twins are two people if they have two separate brains, implying that what we think of as human is a mind, not a set of DNA.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Get this through your head: crying about the possibility that you might have been aborted as a blastocyst is like crying that the rapist might never have attacked your mother. No one is denying that you're a person, or that you're capable of doing good, or any of that. Because pro-choice advocates say that grown human beings aren't people because of the circumstances of their conception? Where the hell are you getting this from?
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
If the source cells are just skin cells, why can't they simply be taken from the patient? Why is rejection considered as a problem, when patients could receive transplants of their own stem cells?
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
You know that there are quite a few other birth control options that prevent fertilization other than condoms. Such as cap, diaphragm, foam, sponge, femi-dom. The only real disadvantage to these is that they don't prevent transmission of AIDS thus they haven't been pushed by the Government. Also note that ANY form of birth control is sacrilegious to the whacked out "Every Sperm Is Sacred" Catholic nutjobs.
I reject your premise that in every case a fetus is equivalent to a fully formed human.
In that light your points are completely irrelevant.
In addition, whether you realize it or not, you sound incredibly draconian and misogynist. Your views, quite frankly, are totally dated and unrealistic in modern society, and regardless of how loudly you bang your drum, you'll never get the world you're preaching for.
Ultimately, your insistence on repeating the "murder" tripe is a clear indicator of your inability to rationally consider the realities of the situation.
Catholic moral teaching opposes both abortion and contraception (with the exception of NFP). However, I think you would find very few Catholics anywhere who believe that the two are morally equivalent, and I can't believe you would find anyone who would prefer an abortion over contraception. This is reflected in Church teaching as well, as by the teaching that anyone who procures an elective abortion automatically excommunicates themselves, which is certainly not true of contraception.
He may not be a man of science, but he is a man of God and his religious faith was enough to tell him sacrificing all those poor babies to allow a few godless heathens to avoid going to hell for a few months is a bad idea.
I'm not sure, is that sarcasm? Since it's not obvious, I'll assume it's not.
You must be kidding. "Poor babies"? They are clumps of 180 cells. You throw away more every time you flick a booger. It's not a baby. It's not even a growth because it wouldn't have implanted yet. Every time a fertility clinic does an in-vitro procedure, afterward it throws away thousands of similar clumps of cells, just flushes them down the drain.
Y'know, I just reread your message, and now I'm sure -- it must have been a joke...
*** *** You're just jealous 'cause the voices talk to me... ***
...but I agree with scuttlemonkey's heading - from the "awaiting-further-objections dept".
I'm "awaiting objections" from the side of the political crowd that has been demanding unrestricted Embryonic Stem Cell harvesting for years.
Because, you see, if indeed there is a way to create pluripotent stem cells without necessarily taking them from fetuses, one might say that Pres. Bush's moral qualms were in hindsight justifiable, and acted as a spur toward the development of less-morally-questionable sources.
And it seems to be inconceivable to one side of the political spectrum that anything Bush & co. would do could be right in both a scientific and moral sense.
-Styopa
It's true that a tiny clump of cells with no nervous system doesn't seem much like a person, but I have two young children who not very long ago were very similar tiny clumps of cells. Now, they eat and sleep and play and smile at their Dad, and the older one walks and talks and has all kinds of opinions about things. It seems sad to think that someone would do away with them at an early stage just because they weren't yet able to do all the things they can do now. Just my opinion of course.
The issue is really whether fertilization creates a human being. Neither an egg or a sperm individually can possibly be considered a human being, as it only has half the requisite number of chromosomes. The same thing cannot be said of a fertilized egg, and although many people don't believe it's a human being, some do.
With respect to an egg that has been fertilized outside of a woman, you're quite right: if it is not implanted, it will die. But how did that fertilized egg get there in the first place? It isn't as if they're just laying around on the floor and someone picks them up and uses them to do cloning research. If you believe that fertilization is sufficient to create a human being, then you probably shouldn't fertilize any eggs unless you believe that you have a pretty good chance of being able to keep them alive. If you don't believe that, then of course there isn't any problem.
This is mildly inaccurate, since the Catholic Church does permit the use of Natural Family Planning as a method of birth control, and also because the Catholic Church does not believe that there is anything sacred about sperm (or eggs, or skin cells, or anything other type of cell). The bigger problem is that referring to members of an organization that includes one-sixth of the world's population as "whacked out nutjobs" seems to meet the usual definition of "Flamebait".
The vast majority of eggs fertilized outside of the natural process are fertilized for ... surprise ... fertilization treatments. Even most of the eggs actually implanted in the uterus die, and there are plenty left over that are not implanted at all.
So if you have a bunch of fertilized eggs that are going to die anyway, why not do something productive with them?
paintball
That's a good question. If the "something productive" happens to be implanting them in the womb to be in rathof someone who wants to be a Mom, then I think it's a great idea. In fact, there are programs like Snowflake that attempt to accomplish exactly that.
If the "something productive" happens to be stem cell research, then it's a little bit more iffy, because if you thought that it was wrong to create the embryos in the first place, then you run the risk that by using them you're creating an incentive to (wrongly) create even more such embryos in the future. And, if you do happen to believe that they are human beings, then they deserve a certain amount of respect in both life and death. Most of us would, for example, consider eating our deceased relatives a rather disgusting prospect, even if it could be rendered safe from a public health perspective, but why not do something useful with all that good meat? Well, AFAICS, it's out of respect for the deceased, even though, in practical terms, they're not in a position to care.
There's a team in Japan (I think) who announced they were well on their way a couple of years ago. I believe they've been successful with mice, but I could be remembering wrong. It will likely be viable within a single digit number of years... low double digits at most.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
What makes one stage or state of your children's existence more important than the others? If you can't draw a meaningful, qualitative distinction between one state and another based on what we know about existence, then I see no rational basis for assigning higher value to one or the other. I understand the intuitive and emotional appeal to such thinking and I suppose that's fine, but we shouldn't erect ethical barriers to embryonic stem cell research on that basis, when it has the potential to improve the lives of conscious human beings, like yourself and your children (note that I don't know how you feel about stem cell research itself, I'm just noting that the sort of observation you made is often closely followed by an argument against such research).
"Wow. The majority of this article's discussion are children of my -1 troll first post."
You said something stupid and people lined up to correct you. How is that surprising?
"Not bad, I'd say."
Well, no one agrees with you on this, but I doubt that's new territory for you. YES BAD. If what you said was so colossally ridiculous and inflammatory that it brought a ton of people out to tell you how ridiculous and inflammatory it was, that's an indication that you're way off the mark with your thought processes. It doesn't make you a rebel, or a forward thinker, or insightful, or and individual. It makes you wrong and incapable of comprehending it.
Get it?
Nothing. I'm just not so sure they can be said to "exist" in any meaningful way before they're conceived. If you pick any random sample of 17 pounds of atoms from the universe, there's some chance that they'll end up being part of a child very similar to my six-month old some day. But it's vanishingly small. Even if you pick a couple of random gametes, even from people of opposite sex whose relationship is such that those gametes might run into each other some day, the chance of a child from that particular remains very, very low. But once fertilization occurs in the womb, the chances go way up. They're nothing like 100% for the first few weeks, but the outlook is orders of magnitude brighter than it was before the happy coincidence of sperm meets egg. So I think that's the point when the child actually "exists" (though child may not be the right word for that point) and anything before that is something else which, as fortune would have it, ended up as part of the child.
Perhaps you refer to this as vitalist superstition, but I'm not so sure it's any different for a adult or, for that matter, an object. The atoms that were part a year ago are now dispersed far and wide, and still other ones will be part of you a year from now. Yet, somehow, you'll still be you. If I run a broadsword through the atoms that were part of you last year but are now someplace far from human habitation, you presumably will not care. If I run the same broadsword through the atoms that make up you right now, you'll probably mind a lot more, at least until you pass out from shock and blood loss. And I don't really care if you do whatever with the termite-infested boards that used to be on the back of my garage, wherever they are now, but I will mind quite a bit if you start ripping the boards that are part of it now apart. On the other hand, before my garage was built, it didn't exist at all: the boards were just boards, not parts of what was going to be a garage, and after it's knocked down, it won't exist any more either, even though all of its constituent parts will still be floating around there somewhere. I guess I can't prove that any of this has any objective reality to it at the atomic level, but I think it would be difficult to do much of anything without admitting that people and objects are concepts with some understandable, if not absolutely precise, meaning, and that it's possible to identify their boundaries by physical inspection.
The "pro-choice" movement doesn't kick people out for "choos[ing] life". The "pro-choice" movement kicks people out for telling women that they cannot choose, that they will be forced to give birth whether they wish to or not. The "pro-choice" movement does not lobby for mandatory abortion; it lobbies for women to have the choice (there's that word) of whether or not to have an abortion. They are neutral on the issue of whether one should or should not get an abortion, taking the position that that's the business of the person lugging around the fetus.
Nice, though, how you think "choose life" means "exert control over others' bodies".
Skipping the bit where you complain about the school's sex-ed not properly discouraging people from having sex, as it doesn't relate to anything I said... See, this nonsense about using abortion as birth control is more of that "women don't get abortions for the right reasons, so we need to step in and stop them, so that stupid sluts learn their lesson" bullshit I mentioned before; you want to punish women for what you see as their irresponsibility in having too much sex. I reckon that should a condom break or somesuch, you and your ladyfriend would be getting an abortion, assuring yourselves that it was a good one, that you weren't like those other people.
Here, I have a fat stack of anecdotes from people who sound very much like you. Please read them and see if you notice anything familiar.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
> Well, there's also the rapist's fear that even after a guy has gone to the trouble of raping a woman, she might go and undo all his hard work.
Yeah, because we all know that the pro-life people are supportive of rape, I mean, it's not like they consider it a mortal sin or anything, right?
> Where the hell are you getting this from?
Might have learned to cast ridiculous aspersions on peoples' motives from someone like you? I dunno, but it'd make a lot of sense.
If you're going to disagree with someone, you can do better than to invent ridiculous motives that give you an excuse to hate them. Doing so is bigoted.
Well, AFAICS, it's out of respect for the deceased, even though, in practical terms, they're not in a position to care.
You don't not eat dead people because of the wishes of the dead people, you don't eat dead people because people who are alive want to believe they won't be eaten when they die. And if dead people get eaten, then people who are alive can't live life in the comfort of knowing they won't be eaten.
It's not a good analogy - because living people are GOING to die. Nobody who is alive has any risk of being killed for stem cells. We're already past the point where that COULD have happened to us.
So, are all the currently not-dead-yet embryos served by knowing that they won't be killed for stem cell research? Of course not - they're just embryos, and not aware of anything.
paintball
Really? I'm not sure I care if someone eats me when I die, but I'm positive that I don't want to eat anyone else. Yuck.
It's not a good analogy - because living people are GOING to die. Nobody who is alive has any risk of being killed for stem cells. We're already past the point where that COULD have happened to us.So, are all the currently not-dead-yet embryos served by knowing that they won't be killed for stem cell research? Of course not - they're just embryos, and not aware of anything.
I guess I'm dubious about the idea that morality is driven by fear that something similar might happen to oneself. I'm at very low risk of being the victim of an insurance scam because I'm well-educated and financially savvy; I'm at very low risk of being raped because I'm male; I'm at very low risk of being killed in a friendly fire incident because I'm not and have never been part of any country's military forces and I'm too old to be drafted. But this doesn't mean that I'm indifferent about those things happening to other people, because I'm capable of imagining myself in their place. I would not have wanted my mother to have an abortion when she was pregnant with me, because then I wouldn't be here writing this comment on Slashdot when I should be working.
I don't think anyone could label these cells "embryonic" because they were made to resemble embryonic cells. They didn't come from mouse embryos; they came from adult skin cells. That being said, I don't know why anyone would have ethical objections to adapting this technique to human cells. I am firmly opposed to any operation that harms humans at any stage of development, but since no adult person would be seriously harmed by the harvesting of their skin cells, I say this looks like a useful advance in science.
"You rejection means nothing but your lack or inability to objective view anything concerning the topic."
No asshole, my rejection was meant to get you thinking beyond the assumption that a fetus is a living, whole human being. Your argument relies on that premise from it's inception, and I do not believe it to be true.
So instead of actually reading my post, you make a baseless assumption and proceed from there. Very much in line with your previous posts, and your whole line of reasoning in general.
"And I don't really care what you think my Ideas and thought sound like."
Which is exactly what I was getting at, you're irrationally attached to a position, so much so that when honestly criticized you react with aggression. I bet when asked, racists say EXACTLY what you said. I doubt that's a coincidence.
"I know why you posted as AC, it is because you could add nothing to counter the argument presented."
I would say disagreeing with your central premise adds something. I would say asking you to consider that your ideas are antiquated and socially backward is something. I would say that line you wrote there is you being defensive because of your total lack of rationality for your argument, resulting in a complete inability to defend it from genuine scrutiny.
If your argument had any basis beyond your own assumptions of correct moral behavior, it would have been trivial to debate it with me. Instead, you flame me because you argument is flawed and indefensible.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Here's a chart; please note the part about rape and incest exceptions.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Communicable disease issues. Demographic issues. Education issues. Wow! The public is affected.
Clearly, such activity should be regulated!
Somehow, I don't think you like your argument anymore.
I see, well put. I'd say conception was a milestone in the ultimate formation of your children's identities, though "existence" is fuzzy and hard to define for the reasons you point out. So I can understand why you value the process that lead to the formation and birth of your beloved children, and why you'd treat the moment of conception with a measure of special personal meaning (since you love your children as they are) but I don't it's anything that should give us pause in our use of human blastocysts in medical research.
That made less sense than your first post. You should have just cut your losses.
Apparently you do not understand your own logic then. You claimed, in essence, that any behavior that affects the public is something that can be regulated. I hate to inform you, but that means EVERYTHING you do could be regulated and that NOTHING is private. I am sure you would not want to live in such a world.
Cancer, for example, is a private issue. It is not contagious and only has effects on third parties (such as your family and doctors) are via voluntary relationships. Claiming that it is "public" because you will be out of work and therefore not paying taxes is silly. If your definition of public is so broad, it covers everything and there is no privacy.
Pah. Blind freaks can't tell a joke's a joke.
It is no longer uncommon to be uncommon.
Hint: the difficult concept I'm talking about is the difference between "life is always sacred" and "let's kill a fucking criminal"..
http://www.your.brain/ is your friend.
--
"The crux of the biscuit is the Apostrophe(*)" - FZ
Cancer is a huge burden on the public in terms of costs paid by medicare (read the public). In fact, direct payments made by medicare for cancer treatment is over 60 billion dollars a year. Research has led to increased ability to detect and cure cancer, which is why cancer rates have dropped recently. So it's in the best interest of the public to fund research because they not only directly benefit from new cures, but they also save money by reducing the amount of money paid by medicare for treatment.
Yes there are potential impacts of sex on the public, which is why sex *is* regulated. Don't believe me, go have anal sex with a 10 year old in Alabama or ask yourself why blood tests for STDs are required in a number of states before marriage or why there is gov't funding of sex education.