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Scientists Turn Skin Into Blood
Breakthru writes "In an important breakthrough, scientists at McMaster University have discovered how to make human blood from adult human skin. The discovery, published in the prestigious science journal Nature today, could mean that in the foreseeable future people needing blood for surgery, cancer treatment or treatment of other blood conditions like anemia will be able to have blood created from a patch of their own skin to provide transfusions. Clinical trials could begin as soon as 2012."
In an important breakthrough, scientists at McMaster University have discovered how to make human blood from adult human skin.
So not only will it clot, it can tan?
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
That whole "walking around with no skin" situation could be a bit of a problem.
So you think walking around with no blood is preferable?
#DeleteChrome
Oops, sorry, a real link.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
So they'll be able to grind up people and use them for blood transfusions, right?
From what I read in other articles not posted on slashdot, something like a 12x12 cm patch of skin is enough to create enough blood for a transfusion. That's about the same amount removed during normal grafting operations.
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DNA -- National Dyslexic Association
A good question. The backwards conversion is impossible because the vast majority of blood cells are RBCs (Red Blood Cells or erythrocytes) and these have gotten rid of their nucleus, making them a cellular dead end doomed to destruction in about 120 days.
Also, blood is mostly free water (plasma) and when RBCs are created their progenitor cells divide many times in the production process. Assuming that this process they're using is similar, you're talking about impressive volume multiplication in the conversion from skin to blood.
Then again.... I'm an idiot .....
...... and idiots rule the world....
You should probably be aware that not all Christians are Catholics. There are plenty of Christians who believe in birth control (including many Catholics who disagree with their church over it).
Most of them don't believe in abortion as a convenient form of birth control, though. Contraception is much easier, safer, and cheaper for the mother than abortion, even if you do think abortion is grand.
Personally, I'm against abortion in principle unless it's an unusually dangerous pregnancy for the mother or the result of rape or incest. However, I know that making it illegal wouldn't stop it. It'd just drive it underground and make everybody involved -- mothers, fathers, doctors and nurses performing -- worse off. I think it should be, as President Clinton said, "legal, safe, and rare".
Now, about the difference between IVF and abortion... IVF is not abortion. The embryos from IVF used for ECS research have not been implanted then scraped out by a surgeon. They are the spare embryos that were never implanted in the uterus. These are left over from women and couples trying to get pregnant and have kids, not preventing it. It's not about birth control in the common sense of the phrase, which is preventing births.
Your argument seems to confuse quite a few topics. You also generalize quite a few groups into one you clearly disagree with the most. In your quest to vilify people as simpletons who don't grasp the issues at hand, you have oversimplified the topics and (probably intentionally) failed to even acknowledge the issues at hand are much more complex than you mention.