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Scientists Clone Human Embryos To Make Stem Cells
cyachallenge writes "Scientists say they have, for the first time, cloned human embryos capable of producing embryonic stem cells. 'We had to find the perfect combination,' Mitalipov says. As it turned out, that perfect combination included something surprising: caffeine. That ingredient, plus other tweaks in the process, including using fresh eggs and determining the optimal stage of each egg's development, Mitalipov says."
Starbucks is now offering the Frappeblast(tocyst) (c).
Makes everything EVEN BETTER!!!
Whenever I have eggs and caffeine it upsets my bowels.
The Official Site of 1337 Pwnage
"using fresh eggs and caffeine"
Sounds more like making breakfast than human cloning.
I too am useless without my morning dose of caffeine.
caffeine == life
Koans and fables for the software engineer
Good to see at least a little forward progress in my life.
It is by the juice of java that cells acquire speed
The body begins to grow
The growth becomes a forming.
It is by caffeine alone I set my cells in motion
The java must flow!
oh noes :-O
The Slashdot headline neglected to mention that they synthesised an embryo from adult human skin cells - so it's 100% genetically compatible with the donor.
Why does this planet spin? What drives it to?
Was it a "oops" moment when one of the scientist knocked some of his coffee into a sample?
Be seeing you...
The house of Starbucks agrees.
"On the day you were one, you became two. But when you become two, what will you do?"
Now they'll have the anti stem cell AND anti cloning nutjobs to deal with.
So if one has any sort of ethical dilemma with harvesting stem cells from embryos under the notion that such willful destruction of embryos is equivalent to premeditated homicide, this particular technique shouldn't make those people breathe any easier, and in fact, may be cause for them to scream even more outrage at the notion that, to use words they might throw around, "they are creating even more people to deliberately murder".
Didn't Hwang Woo-suk do this 9 years ago? ;-)
I think I'll wait a little while before I get too excited.
I bet if they added bacon the cloning process would go better!
...does to a spider's web weaving ability, this does not sound like a good idea.
I would send it to work in my place, except, he would more than likely do the same, and so on, and so forth.. :)
question...
The artical mentions that some have ethical concerns that the egg donors were/are paid for their contributions. This has always struck me as odd. Why should these women NOT be paid? They are undergoing significant discomfort and inconvenience, and I would guess at least some risk to their health, since the procedure is probably performed under sedation if not anesthesia. The researchers themselves are paid, almost certainly so are the 'ethics professionals' who are wringing their hands over the implications. Why not the women who are providing a vital, irreplacable resource? Note that we are discussing UNFERTILIZED eggs, most of which are 'wasted'; we are not talking about -say- kidneys or livers where the possibility or even probability economic coersion is clearly of concern. Monty Python aside, even fundamentalist stereotypes are unlikely to be able to credibly campaign for the Rights of the Unfertilized.
There may be good reason for the idea that the only one who should not -dare i say- profit from tissue donation is the donor, but that reason has never been made clear to me.
Note FWIW that I (the AC commenter) am male.
Note also that the dual* of the egg donor is often paid.
*"look it up" see also Big Bang Theory, episode 1
... should be arrested and imprisoned for life for their disgusting crimes.
Do any of you Slashdot idiots think they actually stop at a certain age of development? They will carry on and will create human babies in the laboratory - obviously all of these Frankensteins support abortion, as do most of the Slashdot sociopaths...
glorious! :)
I could have told you that. All of my processes are horrible without the addition of caffeine.
Somatic Cell Nuclear transfer. Actually the nice thing about this is that if you had some genetic disease(like cystic fibrosis) you could take the genetic material out of one of your skin cells, correct it, and then use that with this process to make an embryo. If at some point humanity figured out how to grow an organ from this embryo then you could try to make a lung with this that didn't have cystic fibrosis but you wouldn't reject either.
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
I have to keep clipping my eyebrows though...
To be, or not to be: isn't that quite logical, Slashdot Beta?
Here's a questions someone might be able to answer. If a woman has all her eggs when she is born, why are we harvesting them from living women, why aren't cadaverous eggs a viable solution? One body donated to science could yield thousands of eggs?
Cheap storage VM.
Bobby was right, "Evrahbahdy muss git clohhned!"
Some settling may occur during posting.
As long as we've perfected this, why not just grow them a little more, for meat?
-Styopa
I want a clone of me so it can work and I can troll on /. all day :)
An "oops" moment?. No.
Scientific progress goes "boink".
I regard coffee as WD-40 for the brain.