Stem-Cell-Like Cells Produced From Skin 265
MikShapi writes "Skin cells can now be turned into something resembling stem cells. A genetic modification to four genes using a viral vector reverses differentiating, making the cells revert to a stem-cell state, capable for becoming any other cell in the body. The researchers are calling them 'iPS cells' or 'induced pluripotent stem cells.' In their experiments, iPS cells in the lab turned into nerve cells, heart muscle, and other tissues. The research was published in Cell and Nature by teams from the universities of Kyoto and Wisconsin. The article notes that if the new method proves successful, 'we can disconnect the whole stem cell debate from the culture war, from battles over embryo politics and abortion rights.' And, should this technique be adopted, stem cells will henceforth be abundant, easier and cheaper to come by for research and therapeutic purposes."
Re:The science! (Score:5, Insightful)
This is Incredibly Exciting to me (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:The science! (Score:4, Insightful)
I wonder, if we hadn't been objecting, would anybody have attempted to find this alternative, or would researchers have considered the embryonic method good enough?
Re:This won't stop them turning it into an issue.. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:The science! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:The science! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:The science! (Score:3, Insightful)
stem cell researchers were using cells from unused IVF samples, not killing babies as you people like to compare it to. I can't even begin to understand how you could equate a couple of cells in a petree dish to a human.
And no, this line of research would still have been pursured without your stupid agenda, because it solves other problems not rooted in religous objections. So you don't get to claim this is some kind of victory.
Re:The science! (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:The science! (Score:3, Insightful)
In my view, the scientifically deficient position is that life has a beginning.
The concept of being alive is a vaguely defined multi-dimensional continuum. Some things are more alive and some things are less alive. Some things are more alive in one way and less alive in another way. The idea that life (and "not life") is somehow a clear binary distinction has no basis in factual observation. Of course, even more fundamentally, the idea that "life" must be preserved and protected has no basis in science and only an indirect basis in fields of ethics and aesthetics - but that's a topic for another time.
Anyway, the most accurate scientific statement is that life is passed continuously from parents to children. If life had a "beginning", that beginning would have been millions of years ago when the first nucleic acids started making copies of themselves. Sperm is alive (and human - in the case of human sperm). Unfertilized egg cells are alive (and human - in the case of human egg cells).
Based on factual observation, over time an embryo/fetus develops attributes that make it desirable from an ethical or aesthetic perspective to preserve the the embryo/fetus's life. For example, eventually a fetus probably develops an ability to feel pain. A late term fetus may even have a rudimentary will to live. An embryo/fetus also begins to look progressively more "human" and many people have an aversion to killing things that look human.
What needs to happen with this whole business is that the law needs to recognize that, based on factual observation, there is no distinct boundary between alive and not alive. Instead there is a gradual development of attributes that make destruction increasingly undesirable. A fertilized human egg cell has essentially no attributes that makes its destruction undesirable. A late term fetus has most of the same attributes that make destruction of adult humans undesirable.
People do all kinds of crazy things on the basis of beliefs that have no basis in science. That's just the way life is. But, when it comes to positions that are scientifically deficient, the most scientifically deficient position with regard to this issue is that life is a binary state that has a distinct beginning.
Re:The science! (Score:4, Insightful)
Think of it this way. The government wants to do X. X in itself is not that bad, but it is a minor version of Y, which is totally unacceptable. X can lead to Y if you are not careful. Do you allow X?
Now let's say X is limited wire tapping of international phone calls without a warrant and Y is a police state. Do you allow X?
Now the way I see it is this. X is experimenting with human embryos. Y is experimenting with fully formed humans. Do you allow X?
If you did not provide the same answer for both, can you explain why?
Someone is going to bash me but... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:The science! (Score:5, Insightful)
At what age does a human/zygote make the cut so that it is no longer available for scientific research? Two months? Six months? Birth? Five years? When they are potty trained? What classifies a human as a human deserving human rights? What test must be passed before that clump of cells is human? Who are you to decide? What if the government decided the age of liberty was your age +1? How would that make you feel?
Re:Viable (Score:3, Insightful)
You're certainly entitled to your opinion, but please be aware that, if you consider stem-cell embyros to be "viable humans", orders of magnitude more "viable humans" are destroyed by discarding excess IVF embryos and by abortion than have ever been used to produce stem cells.
Yes, that's true, but there is such a thing as dying with dignity. If an embryo is not going to be used, I'd rather see them destroyed in a dignified way than just say, "well, they ain't goin' anywhere, let's do some experiments! Yeee HAW!"
And I'm against abortion as well for these same reasons. And there's no arguing that those embryos aren't viable.
Re:It's not the end of the debate though. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:MOD PARENT TROLL (Score:3, Insightful)
Word games. That sounds all well and good, but ignores reality. You see, organized religion (which is what we all mean when we say "religion" hereabouts, it does not refer to some unique personal profession of faith) is all about people, not God. In the end, if it turns out that God is just another of Man's less useful inventions, even that caveat will go away.
More to the point, it's all about people doing things to each other in the name of God. If it were true (and it isn't) that the bulk of the faithful were permitted their own personal belief systems, their own ways of communing with God, without any dogma or ritual being imposed upon them from without
God has less to do with that most people want to admit.
Re:How will the skin get harvested? (Score:3, Insightful)
Nobody in their right mind would set up donation banks though. One of the best parts about being able to induce pluripotency is that you can use cells from the patient themselves, which means no rejection.
Re:Embryonic Stem Cells - not a threat (Score:4, Insightful)
The only cogent logical argument for definition of life other than "life begins at conception" that I've heard is that the definition of life should be the opposite of the definition of death as it is currently defined. No heartbeat, brain waves, etc. In other words, when you can't medically define a mass of cells that will eventually develop into a human as "dead," then it's a human life.
If there's any other logical definition, please let me know. Otherwise, the definition of what is human life really is just an emotional plea to support whatever you want to advocate. But "it doesn't even look like a baby!" isn't a rock-solid basis on which to form an ethical argument.
And certainly the potential of the mass of cells has to be considered. If you were in a coma on life-support with little or no brain function, but we were 99% certain that in nine months you'd recover completely, could you justify pulling the plug on the machines keeping you alive?
If not, how do you ethically justify doing the same thing to that mass of cells?
Re:The science! (Score:3, Insightful)
To demonstrated, let me extend your hysterical little list with one more: what makes conception special?
Now, to demonstrate I am not an idiot, I will actually discuss this question rather than stupidly spewing forth an endless series of minor variations on it.
Genetic uniqueness is not required to make a human human. On the one hand we have identical twins, who are unique individuals despite being genetically identical. Likewise, a clone of a human would be a unique individual with the same political and moral status as anyone else (side note: all arguments about the supposed ethical conundrums surrounding human cloning can be solved by replacing the word "clone" everywhere by "child" or "adult" as appropriate.) And on the other hand we have chimeric individuals, who contain more than one complete set of genes in two different cell populations, yet are only one human.
So there is nothing special about conception due to it being the point of creation of a genetically unique human being, because there is nothing about genetic uniqueness that endows a human being with their political and moral status. Identical twins, on the one hand, and chimeric individuals, on the other, demonstrate that nothing about humans depends on the uniqueness or number of their genetic codes. But the only thing that happens at conception is the melding of two haploid cells to create a new genetically unique cell. There is nothing special about this genetically unique cell versus any of the billions in my body or yours. It is just a cell that has a non-zero probability of becoming an adult.
Yet that non-zero probability is not interesting either. A zygote has a fraught and difficult course to become an embryo, a fetus, a baby, a child and an adult. Depending on time and place each of these, particularly the first, have probabilities of well below 1.0.
Sperm and egg have much smaller probability of becoming zygotes, but it is with absolute certainty more than zero.
Ergo, given that you have a deep and apparently obsessive fascination with arbitrary numeric limits, and you furthermore seem to be concerned with zygotes and later rather than sperm/eggs and earlier: at what point does the probability of a cell becoming an adult drop low enough that it no longer enjoys any rights?
Only by invoking an arbitrary and subjective dividing line can you avoid this question, and whatever argument you use, that very same argument can be used to justify a different dividing line based on a different (but equally arbitrary) division.
You, of course, have already established you're an idiot, so no doubt this argument will have no effect on you. Idiots are remarkably resistant to anything that might wean them from their idiocy. So this whole post is rather pointless. But there are those of us who think that even idiots ought to be given an explanation of their errors once in a while.
Re:The science! (Score:3, Insightful)
We certainly can't do it now, but is there any real doubt that this will be a possibility in the future?
Of course, we still need to answer some questions: what are rights? who(what?) gets them, and why?
Once we really have the answers to those questions, all this controversy will sort itself out.
Um. No. Totopotent vs. pluripotent. (Score:5, Insightful)
The answer is, we don't have an answer. We haven't done the leg work to find out what the range of use is on embryonic stem cells. This debate has nothing to do with ethics. No medical ethics are violated here, the debate is 100% about religion. The fact is, if one actually worried about the embryo, scientists would be happy to make lines by taking some cells from a developing embryo, then make a stem cell line out of those and implant the embryo and get an infant out of the deal. So rather than some embryo which would otherwise be medical waste, we would have a stem cell line and a child. Who could object? -- Um, religious folks; they still object.
It could very well be that ASCs are all we need and that we could dedifferentiate them easily with full usability, able to make everything from a new kidney to an embryo and a clone army. The problem however, is we just don't know because the research isn't there. The idea that a clump of 150 cells without any nerves at all is the ethical equivalent to a child, or that that clump of cells is more valued than somebody with a spinal cord injury whose treatments are being prolonged is a joke. A fly has 100,000 nerve cells and is by far the ethical superior of swaths of embryos.
Embryonic stem cells might not be any more useful. And we'll always have that "might" there until we do the research.
There's nothing about medical ethics which suggests some kind of soul thing jumps into a zygote at the moment the gametes join, and nothing to suggest that a couple cells aren't just that, some cells. If you read this story you must realize that there is no more ethics problems with ESCs then there is with scratching my ass. In fact, I'm bound to scratch away swaths more cells with the ass-scratch. Ethics? No. This is about religion and the unevidenced nonsense it advocates for no reason in particular. This research is useful, but it doesn't answer the actual questions we need answered.
Re:Viable (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:The science! (Score:5, Insightful)
And then it diverts attention from all those acts by crating fake controversies, over imaginary "murders" of "living cells".
How *do* you define life then? It might be fine to just ban the abortion of a unborn fetus older than 2 months. There are tons of medical reasons to support that decision. But if you want to push the line even further, where does it stop? A ban on the morning after pill? A ban on condoms, since they interfere with "potential" life and thus "murder" it as well? A ban on masturbation perhaps, since it is also wasting potential "life"? How *do* you define life? What makes one kind of cell(fertilized egg) "alive" and yet other(sperm) is not, when neither is showing any greater sentience than the other at the early stages at least? If you make a criterion, what is the "rationale" behind that criterion?
And how soon before we get people being persecuted for masturbating, or using protection during sex? What is the guarantee that this lunacy will not lead to *THAT*? Historical evidence shows that when we put "government" in charge of personal decisions, and allow them too much power, *that* is when "experimentation on humans" happen. Care to give one example of a reasonably democratic country where human experimentation was tolerated? I can definitely give examples of fascist, police states, where the human experimentation happened and was ignored by citizens. And a government making insane, illogical laws that are just a step way for interfering with personal decisions of people, is more likely to lead to a fascist, police state.
And if "life" is so holy, what is the arrogant reasoning behind killing and eating other "near-sentient" lifeforms? By your logic everyone should be forced to become vegetarian? Oh wait! Even plants have been proven to be alive! So, it is the arrogant belief that only human beings are "truly" alive, right?
But that is a very Christian belief, isn't it? i.e. humans being the only "really" alive beings! As a matter of fact Jain and Buddhist religion consider even lower life forms to be just as alive and forbid killing them because of the desire avoid the very same arrogant hypocrisy. So basically the American Government is just enforcing a "Christian" belief, while paying lip service to the idea of being secular, "religious equality" and "separation of state and the church".
Re:Viable (Score:4, Insightful)
Your sense of dignity extends to even cells, but not to the animals or plants you consume every day. May I ask "Mr. atheist", what makes *your* cell superior to the cells present on animals and plants?
As an "atheist", you lose even the stupid argument of "coz the bible says so!"
Re:The science! (Score:3, Insightful)
Ad hominems directed toward the parent aside, you misunderstand the argument one might make in respect of conception as the beginning of life, and have clouded the water with only marginally related (although interesting) questions regarding cloning and such.
Conception as the beginning of life follows a line of thinking something like this:
1) The zygote/embryo/fetus is a human thing. (of course, so is your arm or kidney)
2) This thing is not non-living, so it is a living thing. (whether it is independent has nothing to do with whether it is living--see arm/kidney)
3) This thing is genetically distinct from the parents. (as opposed to unique, as per your example of identical twins)
4) So the zygote/embryo/fetus is a living human thing that is not either parent.
Viability outside the womb, or relative completeness of development, is actually irrelevant. At conception, there is a living human thing that is distinct from, and hence not identical to, its parents. The question is whether you think that living human thing has value. Most people think that other human living things have an inherent value, such that it is morally reprehensible to cause such a thing to cease to live (at least against its will, but that's another debate) or to harm it. Also irrelevant is the apparent dissonance in those people who believe that an unborn human living thing must be protected, while one that has been born can be justly killed.
The arbitrary and subjective line drawing enters when one attempts to differentiate between one living human thing and another based on something other than its nature: a living human thing. That nature does not change with stage of development, intelligence, impairment, skin color, gender, sexual orientation, political persuasion, age, criminal behavior and so on.
That's why this matters. It's easy to point at a petri dish and say "it's just a bunch of cells;" as others here have pointed out, the same is true of an adult living human thing. Distinguishing between the two cannot be a matter of mere rhetorical device.
Humanity (Score:4, Insightful)
This is an appeal to emotion. Which happens to be a logical fallacy when it comes to argumentation.
It seems to me that sentience should be the test. At some point in the not too distant future we will create sentient beings that are machine based. This is inevitable. They will have no DNA at all. Using the typical arguments that you seem to embrace, such being should not be afforded the same human rights that you and I have even though they may be thousands of times more intelligent than we are.
Perhaps we should be asking ourselves, what makes us human? I don't think relying on a purely biological answer is very wise or useful.