Rudimentary Liver Grown In a Dish 129
ananyo writes "Japanese scientists have coaxed stem cells into forming a 5-millimeter-long, three-dimensional tissue that the researchers labelled a liver bud — an early stage of liver development. The bud lacks bile ducts but has blood vessels, and when transplanted into a mouse, was able to metabolize some drugs that human livers metabolize but mouse livers normally cannot. The work is 'the first report demonstrating the creation of a human functional organ with vascular networks from pluripotent stem cells,' the team claims."
Re:Burn in Hell! (Score:0, Insightful)
You obviously missed the point. Those turbo-religious types that have issues with this research aren't just against it because of embryonic destruction. I tend to hear from them about things that aren't natural and that their Lord Almighty Savior of Mighty Omniscient Omnipotence (that they sometimes refer to as God) will choose when someone should die and this research interferes with His will. Also, many people are just misinformed and don't care about the details in TFAs when they argue their point. This falls hand-in-hand with the people who still swear Obama is a terrorist and a Muslim, or even the people who still insist that evolution is trickery instilled into peoples' minds by the Devil.
Re:Burn in Hell! (Score:2, Insightful)
Yes. But remember that we only found out how to do this with adult cells by working with the embryonic ones, while in production adult cells may be easer resech on embryonic stem cells is still needed to improve our ability to make them reliably and with reduced cancer risk.
Re:Burn in Hell! (Score:5, Insightful)
What God wants and does not want are things that can be up for discussion.
If God does in fact exist though I can most assuredly tell you that nothing can interfere with his will.
If something human can interfere with Gods will it would not be much of a God.
Re:Burn in Hell! (Score:4, Insightful)
On the contrary, they show that you don't need embryonic stem cells to produce medical advances.
No one ever argued that you need embryonic stem cells to produce medical advances. What people argue is that we don't really know the properties of embryonic stem cells, and there may be medical advances we can make with those that we cannot make adult stem cells. That a medical advance has been made with adult stem cells says nothing about what we could do with embryonic stem cells.
The set of medical advances we can make with adult stem cells may be identical to the medical advances we can make with embryonic stem cells. On the other hand, they may just overlap. The only way we can know that we are not leaving major medical advances undiscovered is to do research on embryonic stem cells.
Besides, all those embryonic stem cells are just going to the incinerator. It takes one sick, evil piece of shit to prefer incineration to the advancement science.
Re:Burn in Hell! (Score:3, Insightful)
And by "teeny, tiny" I mean completely insignificant.
And by insignificant you mean fucking loud.
Re:Burn in Hell! (Score:5, Insightful)
As a distantly former, semi-active "turbo-religious type" (Baptist), from a major metropolitan area that's not in Alabama, I'll second his observations.
There was nothing terribly rare (and certainly not insignificant) about viewing cutting-edge medical science as a meddling denial of God's will. The talking points would probably be a bit more... flowery... and go something along the lines of them being, "desperate attempts to cheat your mortality, to foolishly tell ourselves that we're our own masters, to deny our place as God's children, and that only Jesus' sacrifice can truly save us from suffering." You'd have to talk to a professional preacher to get the exact form of wackiness... I'm a little rusty.
So in this case, if I revisited my old religious groups today I wouldn't be at-all surprised if growing new organs for transplant, however they're presently derived, is considered the fruit of an evil science pioneered in infanticide.
We need to be honest about the underlying issue here... there's no real regard for reason in an institution that depends entirely on a lack thereof. Pretending otherwise (when you're out in public, anyway) is little more than a PR strategy.
Re:Burn in Hell! (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem was that if a discovery was made with them, there would be an incentive to create embryo "farms" to produce more.
So, prohibit the non-incidental production of embryonic stem cells. Banning the research is nothing more than deliberate ignorance.
It's similar to how most people have no problem performing an autopsy, but will get somewhat annoyed if you start creating dead bodies to do so
Which is why we have laws prohibiting people from doing anatomy on cadavers. Oh wait, we don't.
Re:Burn in Hell! (Score:4, Insightful)
Can you link to an example of such complaints? Because Im also not seeing this.
This looks, more than anything, like a classic slashdot strawman.