Slashdot Mirror
Finnish Patient Gets New Jaw from His Own Stem Cells
An anonymous reader writes with news out of Finland, where a patient's upper jaw was replaced with bone cultivated from stem cells and grown inside the patient himself. We discussed other advances in stem cell research a few months ago. Quoting:
"In this case they identified and pulled out cells called mesenchymal stem cells -- immature cells than can give rise to bone, muscle or blood vessels. When they had enough cells to work with, they attached them to a scaffold made out of a calcium phosphate biomaterial and then put it inside the patient's abdomen to grow for nine months. The cells turned into a variety of tissues and even produced blood vessels, the researchers said."
"Nobody wants to deal with the real issue of why there are so many non-viable embryos available for research purposes in the first place. "
This is where your argument is flawed. If it were only discarded embryos used in the process, there might not have been so much fuss. But even scientists that favor embryonic research admit that there just aren't enough discarded embryos for their research. To do it properly, they'd have to have a continuing, and large, supply. The only way to do this viably would be to either harvest them, or produce them en masse, via some kind of factory. I don't know about you, but the prospect of creating massive numbers of human life...even embryonic human life, for the sole purpose of then destroying it to harvest resources just opens up all kinds of pandora's boxes. Add to that the fact that thus far, embryonic research has yet to come up with any of the real world successes that experimentation with adult lines has, and you can see both moral and practical arguments against embryonic research.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
Does anybody really give a fuck about unborn babies? No. The only people who care about unborn babies are unborn babies themselves.