Slashdot Mirror
Stem Cell Fraudster May Have Actually Made Breakthrough
Otter writes "Woo Suk Hwang's career swung from fame over his lab's claim of the first stem cells from a cloned human embryo to humiliation when the results were found to be fake. Research at Harvard on Hwang's cells has found that they are actually parthenogenic lines derived from eggs -- perhaps a more important and difficult achievement than what he had been claiming! 'Researchers said that the distinct "genetic fingerprint" of the stem cells means they may be the first in the world to be extracted from embryos produced by the so-called "virgin birth" method, or parthenogenesis. This happens when eggs are stimulated into becoming embryos without ever being fertilised by sperm, and has been achieved in animals. However, before Hwang, no one had managed to produce a human embryo using parthenogenesis which lived long enough to allow the extraction of viable stem cells.'"
Link to the paper. I submitted this as a story and didn't want to bomb Cell's servers if it hit the main page...
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
I managed to achieve cold fusion while cooking my breakfast in the microwave this morning.
You mean parthenogenic. It means conception of an egg into an embryo without the male sperm (or any other male fertilization).
Yes, in some species, this occurs in nature.
(See? We men aren't useful for much except for fixing cars and hauling around heavy objects.
Because it wasn't previously thought possible.
My blog
This has been done Once before in history... :)
Rule of Acquisition #19: Satisfaction is Not guaranteed.
I, for one, welcome our new zygotless overlords!
Grundes!
The whole lying about the accomplishment aside, I've always said that even if you don't find what you're looking for, humanity is better off for knowing all the other ways of not accomplishing that task vs. no research done at all.
An I.T. motto in the hands of an idiot is a dangerous thing...
I mean, could it be that he was not voluntarily trying to scam everybody, but just misinterpreted his results? This is great stuff if it is true!
Stem Cell Fraudster May Have Actually Made Breakthrough
cl-0wned!
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
have egg on their face now?
Cruelest...Parents...Evar
What if the Hokey Pokey really is what it's all about?
Soon they will not need men to reproduce, and will begin eliminating us.
Then all those parallel parking spaces across the world will fall into disuse....wasted real estate....
FTFA:...from embryos produced by the so-called "virgin birth" method, or parthenogenesis.
That's right - Jesus! The Bible is right. The word of God has scientific proof! Yeaaaaassss, praise Jesus!
I see the liiiiight! Aaaaaammmmayyyahen!
I prefer Flambe as apposed flamebait.
Parthenogenesis is how they built that temple in Athens.
(See? We men aren't useful for much except for fixing cars and hauling around heavy objects. ;)
It's a standing joke between my Beloved and I.... "If only cucumbers could mow the grass...."
I hope it's a joke, at least.
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
Maybe, but only if Mary had a Y chromosome.
Badass Resumes
Parthenogenesis only results in female babies.
In order to make male babies, you need a Y chromosome(which
women don't have).
This was covered yesterday on NPR Radio.
All of us know, long time ago, in a galaxy far away, the mitochloreans engineered a parthenogenic birth in Tattoonie.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
"Um. Yeah. Well... I planned that. It's a feature."
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
best be glad she knows nothing of astroturf :P
"He" did have awfully long hair.
Badass Resumes
Unfortunately, they dont even need us for cars or lifting anymore.
And since us average slashdot readers weren't good for either anyway. what are we gonna do???
AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!
But seriously. Am I to understand that this guy did something thats amazingly hard to do, and fraudulently claimed he did something else that was easier than what he really did. And if that's so, what is wrong with this guy? Does he even understand the field he claims to work in?
Yes, now you too can have your own personal Jesus. Someone to hear your prayers, someone who cares, someone whos there...
(Strangely, I now feel like I have a Depeche Mode beating in my immediate future)
Navicula hydraulica plena anguilarum est. Omnes castelli tuus nostri sunt. Ed elli avea del cul fatto trombetta.
> What are parthogenic lines?
> Is there a way to derive them other than using eggs?
As a Slashdot reader, I am sure that what you really want to ask is: "can we reproduce without women?". And Dr.Hwang's research has sadly failed to produce an answer to that question so far. Perhaps we should set up a donation site to prod him to research in that direction instead of trying to get women to conceive without men. I am sure that millions of Slashdot readers, and, of course, China, would be immensely grateful should such research be successful.
Now that it is, at least, thought possible, stretch a little and theres your immaculate conception.
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
Disclaimer: I'm no scientist, and I only skimmed the paper, but I have an interest in genetics and an interest in seeing this better covered than the mass media is doing. Corrections most welcome.
I'm shooting for the non-geneticist version:
Basic Version:
a normal human cell has 2 copies of 22 non-sex chromosomes, and 2 sex chromosomes. The "copies" are almost certainly NOT identical to one another, but basically similar. These cells are "diploid" (having 2 of each chromosome) and are considered "somatic cells".
During normal reproduction, each person will contribute a "germline cell", an ova or a sperm, in which only 1 copy of each chromosome exists ("haploid"). These germline cells merge to create a "zygote" (which is diploid), which eventually becomes an embryo.
Parthenogenetic reproduction takes a germline cell, and duplicates the genetic material, making a diploid out of a haploid. Such replication happens with normal cells during the process of cell division ("mitosis"), so the real trick is (1) convincing the cell to do this duplication outside the cell division process and (2) convincing the cell that it is no longer a differentiated (specialized) cell, but instead a stem cell.
One interesting result here is that the parthenogenetic cell is NOT a clone of the parent cell - it will have two copies each of ONE of the copies of each chromosome from the parent, determined effectively at random. In some ways this means a parthenogenetic stem cell is less valuable than a cloned stem cell - it will not be a 100% match, though it will not contain any DNA foreign to the donor. In other ways it opens up all sorts of new areas of study.
One particular result is that it opens the opportunity for recessives to be studied. (Chromosomes have genes, each that code various proteins that run the bodies mechanics. Most people will therefore have two copies of every gene (having two copies of the chromosomes). Those genes may not be identical. Some genes only have their effects seen ("express") if there isn't another, different, copy of the gene present, and are called recessives. (blue eyes are a common example: A blue-eyed person has both genes as expressing "blue". Two blue eyed parents, having only the "blue" gene (hah!) to pass on to a child, will have a blue-eyed child (barring mutation). (Of course, the body is a big nasty mess of self-referencing code with lots of gotos, so examples tend to be oversimplified). Anyway, most recessives tend to be fairly rare in expressing, since any dominant gene will cover them up. Many recessives are bad. (Cystic Fibrosis is the most common example: 1 bad gene, okay. 2 bad genes: You die) A parthenogenetic process would allow for the study of recessives because you can take ova from a carrier (someone who has 1 copy of the bad gene), find one with the defective gene, put it through the parthenogenesis process, and bam, able to study the effects free of the presence of any other (different) copy of the gene.
Fun Fact: For 22 Chromosomes, people have two copies of most genes. Sex Chromosomes are not created equal. The X chromosome (every human has 1) has valuable and nifty genes. The Y chromosome (only in men) has very few genes (relatively). As a result, on Men X chromosomes express all recessives, and not on women. (The common example here is red-green colorblindness. Men with a defective gene are out of luck: Color-blind. Women with a defective gene get by if the other copy of the X chromosome has a functioning one. Result: Men are much more likely to be red-green color-blind.
Some papers a few months ago got some press for exploring the possible effects of this. (Men can serve as a "testing ground" for new mutations on the X chromosome, while women can serve as a judge of whether they are valuable without taking on the extra risk. Practiced through natural selection.)
Fun Fact #2: Women's cells don't just function with twice the number of X chromosomes though (We tend to react poorly to extra copies
Roman Priests: Your thoughts betray you. Your feelings for them are strong. Especially for...sister! So, you have a twin sister. Your feelings have now betrayed her, too. The Three Wise Men were wise to hide her from me. Now his failure is complete. If you will not turn to the dark side, then perhaps she will.
CS majors know the time/space tradeoff, but they never get taught the 3rd, crucial, tradeoff of the set: comprehension!
What I got from the article from the BBC certainly suggested that possibility. If the scientific community didn't know that parthenogenesis in humans was possible to induce, and if this scientist didn't know that it was believed impossible...
He would've been in trouble anyway because of where he got the eggs from, but it's possible this was an almost-innocent mistake.
There is a fine line between recklessness and courage... -- Paul McCartney
"Ethicists are satisfied if the destroyed embryo is a cloned one?" No. If it's a human baby, you can't kill it. It's that simple. And from what I understand, this parthogenic egg grows just as any other embryo, correct?
Interesting enough, I just came across this term while looking up Komodo Dragons (which apparently in some cases have been known to have parthenogenic conception while in captivity). There's a wikipedia article on it here. Apparently it has also been known to occur in some fish/sharks or birds (as noted, in incubated turkey eggs).
Actually the wikipedia article is pretty interesting. I wonder if by discovering ways to do this in a test-tube environment, scientists could pave the way to enabling asexual reproduction within mammals or humans... a scary thought actually.
Just to add to this, if a woman is color-blind, then I believe it follows that her offspring will indefinitely be color-blind as well, as the husband has not the genetic material to supply for color-vision?
>>Hwang achieves parthogenesis...
>>There's a joke in there, but I just can't put my finger on it...
I've got it! - Normally, you don't NEED a hwang to achieve parthenogenesis!
I don't know the meaning of the word 'don't' - J
Actually, it was pretty common for celebrity a few thousand years ago to insist the "authorized biography" included:
- virgin birth
- a star
- a prophecy
- relation to a god
Examples are:
-Rome's founder, Romulus, was the Son of the God Mars, and Rea Sivia, a mortal Vestal virgin
-Alexander the Great (conceived a thunderbolt from Zeus) (Today we just use electricity on the cell)
-emperor Augustus (son of God Apollo, conceived by a holy-snake)
-Minerva was the daughter of Jupiter not by sexual union
-daughter of the river Sangarius, they say, took of the fruit and laid it in her bosom, when it at once disappeared, but she was with child. A boy was born, and exposed, but was tended by a he-goat. [Pausanias, Description of Greece 7.17.9-11]
-Jesus
don't cut it off www.mgmbill.org
I think men are safe so long as there are rodents or big scary spiders to be disposed of.
Obama likes poor people so much, he wants to make more of them.
Have you seen the East German or Chinese olympic women swim teams? We're not even needed for that any more, sadly
Glory Season ftw!
It's rare that a one-liner from Slashdot makes me bust out laughing. Good one.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Well now, I had heard that he was wholly mammoth.
I might have gotten that wrong though. Too much beer mixed in with my reading materials.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
I remember that story ... "Jaycee", 1955. Really was a creepy (and, apparently, somewhat prophetic) work by Brown.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Why is this a troll? I laughed!
Legalize it.
That's right kids: every month a woman murders a precious potential life with her sinful menstruation. No wonder the OT made them sit out alone and think about what they had done.
Remember guys: everytime you allow a fertile woman to go a month without being impregnated, you make God very very angry.
Well, given that there is no evidence at all that any Mary was actually a virgin (and all the ways virgins can be impregnated even without breaking their hymen, which ancient peoples were likely ignorant of), its far more likely that she just got knocked up... or that the whole story was rumor-milled into the Jesus story because you weren't considered cool in the Roman Empire unless you were born of a virgin.
Yes, but without any "moment of conception" which nutjobs have declared is the magic process that fills a bunch of dividing cells with magic soulpowers that, say, a tumor or adult stem cells doesn't have.
Of course, in most cases, homo sapien partho lines do NOT naturally develop normally: that's whats interesting about this research is that its been more normal in its development than most.
And s/he gives men reason to hope too.
You can't be ahead of the curve, if you're stuck in a loop.
i actually read somewhere that it was more a mistranslation than anything. i might be wrong but i heard that the original text could have just as easily been translated into 'young woman' as 'virgin'. not sure where i got it from though, so take it with a grain of salt.
It's ambiguous. Regardless, Jewish scholars never considered that passage to be one of the core messianic prophecies to begin with, given that it refers to events that come to happen in the OT. When early Christians decided that Jesus must have been the messiah, they hit the snag that none of the actual major "signs" of the messiah had come to pass. So they scrambled for trying to read all sorts of other possibilities out of Scripture.
Well, it would be funny if it weren't so solidly based in truth. Athens is named after Athena, one of her nick names being Parthenos (the virgin because that's one of her defining characteristics). From there, you get the Parthenon. So, that joke is actually quite true.
"I'm not good. I'm not nice. I'm just right."
> This happens when eggs are stimulated into becoming embryos without ever being fertilised by sperm,
Sweet!
1. No sperm!
2. Therefore, the mountain god Yahweh doesn't infuse the cell with a soul.
3. Therefore it is not a person.
4. Profit!
We did it! We did it! Humanity finally tricked Yahweh!
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Don't ask me. I'm married. ;)
My blog
I'd really like to see how they would react if an egg produced through parthenogenesis were to develop and be born. Would they claim she has no soul and is just imitating other people? Would they change their minds and decide that souls are added at an unknown time after inception? I really doubt many people would give up on the idea of souls, but they'd have to come up with something.