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Science

Cloned Organs Demoed in Laboratory 37

Posted by michael from the no-need-for-organleggers dept.
texchanchan writes "Yahoo reports (warning: picture of cow fetus in bottle) that scientists have grown functioning, 'kidney-like' organs from cloned tissue, and put them back in the progenitor where they do their kidneyish job quite well. The scientists cloned embryos, from which kidney cells were extracted, and 'seeded [this] kidney tissue onto artificial structures that they hoped would grow into kidneys when transplanted back into the steer they were cloned from. ... By themselves, the kidney cells formed a small, kidney-like organ.' Regeneration here we come... especially if somebody learns how to do just the desired organ, not a whole new you with its potential for human rights, etc. To be published in June's Nature Biotechnology (costly registration required)."
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Cloned Organs Demoed in Laboratory

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  • We'll end up with a group of soldiers who couldn't hit the side of a Jawa transport if their blasters were pressed to its side.

    Best bounty hunter in the galaxy, my ass.
  • Where did you get cow fetus?
    Looks like that Tasmanian Wolf pup to me.
  • Of stem cell research begs another question. Where is everyone going to live? Sure we are presently using a miniscule percent of the total land mass on the planet, give it a few generations. If I'm going to live a thousand years I'd like some elbow room to do it in. Probably more then I'm using now. After something less then half a century I'm already looking to get away from the other humans. Population controls, better start thinking hard about population controls now.
    • Read the article. In jars filled with formaldehyde.
      • It's the macro issue of preserving indefinitely or even extending the life spans of 6 some odd billion human beings and their progeny that concerns me. Don't get me wrong, I'd take a new liver in a few years, looks like good work. Another baby step towards immortality? Shrug. Maybe. Since the possibility exists we need to consider the implications.
        • If you expect to live, say, 500 years, then you probably won't have children as fast ... Any society which has life-extension technology generally available will also be one in which birth control is even more available, and will probably have an educated enough populace to use it.

          And if for some reason I'm wrong, well, there are always war, famine, and plague to keep us in line.
          • I wonder whether the organs can grow faster than the cancers that eat them, or if we will need to have a stockpile of organs lying around. Should be fun when the organ banks start making mistakes and switching people's organs. Yes, I said when. If they can switch babies at birth, then someone is gonna lose track of whose heart is whose.
          • The populations which are wealthy enough to afford to use this technology are the ones which have already controlled their birthrate to below replacement levels. It's the nations which can't produce much more than babies which are doing what they can.

    • IIRC, there are resources for ~10^14 people (yes, thats 100 trillion.) in the asteroid belt, that's not counting resources on moon.

      surface is not a real problem if you live in colonies in space, so is energy.

      the only real problem is getting many people up there (again: energy could come from solar satellites.).

      so you see: once you're out of the gravity-well, there is very little space limit for several centuries, live long AND prosper ...
      • Not like any government would currently fund such an expensive move, not with all the important "wars" currently being fought. Oh right, and if microsoft isn't making money on it, you KNOW that it's not gonna happen any time soon...
    • Maybe we'll just kill off all the short-sighted people and use their land.
    • if people, political leaders specifically, lived for centuries there would be more tome for grudges to fester and there would probably be more war, if generations were a longer span, the general views of the populace wouldn't change for decades, the influx of new ideas is generally from the youger generation, if generations were spaced out by centuries, the human race would stagnate
      • Wow, if I had mod power, I'd put you down as "insightful"!

        I'd never thought of that, but it's probably accurate! On the other hand, perhaps we could assume that the human mind is self-repairing, and by aging several hundred years, we would become VERY wise - I mean, think of how wise most 80 year olds turn out to be (if Alzheimers doesn't claim them first), and multiply that a few times. Perhaps our maximum age of ~100 is mere infancy in absolute terms, and by, let's say 300, we grow mature enough to drop grudges and consider war pure lunacy.

        One life cycle simply isn't enough time - I'm already 20 years old (so, with my cholesterol/caffiene intake my life is about 30% complete) and I can tell that I am NOT gonna have enough time on this earth to learn all I want to and DO all I want to! It's a suffocating, clostrophobic feeling.. so maybe if you just give a human a chance, they mature and balance out into wonderful people!
  • Using clear terminology, like "growing" instead of "cloning" when talking about a single organ could help discussions on the cloning debate.

    It appears the the article's author is decidedly pro-cloning. They go on to state that the supposition that cloning won't result in viable, transplantable organ is a main reason people are against cloning.

    I don't think that most people are against growing organs; even the pope thinks that therepudic research using non-embrionic stem cells is ok. This article seems to indicate that the author thinks people are against it because it can't be done, but since it can, it should be. In my experience, far more people have ethical problems with removing cells from an embrio, regardless of how the embrio is produced, with the intention of discarding the embrio after using some of its cells than with achieving similar results (growing a new organ) by techniques that do not involve the destruction of an embrio.

    The important question should always be "should something be accomplished?", not "can something be accomplished?" When these questions are reversed, medical science could progress at a higher rate by using condemned criminals or other undesireables as research subjects.

    I applaud advances in growing organs using non-embrionic stem cells; I pray for the day when using embrios for research is as universally seen as a morally repugnant.

    • Glad this spirred some responses. Yes, growing non embrionic stem cells seems to mitigate most peoples moral objections.

      Another poster mentioned that developed countries will be the only ones with access to this form of technology. And that they have negative population growth. Too bad perhaps, as it is the poorest countries that need to slow their birth rates the most. The imperative to have children because of high infant and child mortality could to some extent be mitigated in the same fashion as in the first world. Fewer deaths, fewer reasons to have 10 kids. Yes? No? Perhaps these fewer children could receive better food, medical attention, education. It's the last one, education, that seems key. Everything else comes with education.
  • Well, I hope this technology arrives in time for the Slashdot crowd and all its free beer.

    And, to quote Bowie Poag: "Cloning is bad. It will only produce more clowns and lawyers" :p

    couldn't find that pic though...

  • I've got this genetic disorder called Alport's Syndrome. It sucks. Macular degeneration, inner ear nerve cell degeneration, and kidney degeneration... (As I recall it's becuase my body doesn't make a particular protein correctly that is found in the support matrices of the three tissues listed.) Anyway, as you can imagine I've been looking at the whole grow-a-new-organ technology with considerable interest. I have a kidney transplant now, which is the most wonderful, selfless, live-giving thing anyone has ever done for me, but the drugs you have to take to keep transplanted tissue vital are a Real Bummer (expensive, bad side effects, or both). So the possibility of having organs tailor grown to fit me, eliminating the need for immunosupressive therapy, is incredibly exciting... The problem is, if organs were grown from my DNA, they'd be defective also (still, it'd probably take 20+ years for them to fail ;) my natural born kidneys made it about 21, and a lot can happen in 20 years...) So, I think this is a neccessary and vital first step. The next revolution will be using genetic modification techniques to tweak the grown organs in such a way to fix the underlying flaw (or even add new features? ;) how'd you like to be able to see into the near infrared? have an extra couple of kHz at teh top of your hearing range? have a different eye color? jeez, and we thought case modding is getting wacky... (of course I imagine that organs with major nerve bundles will take longer to perfect))

    Isn't technology/science cool? I mean, damn... Imagine the radiant smile of a little kid seeing a rainbow for the first time or that of somebody being freed from dialysis or... Makes perl seem almost sorta lame by comparison... ;)

  • I have three points to make here:

    (1) If governments keep banning this and banning that in regards to embrionic and cloning research, all that is accomplished is the nightmare of an underground science community, "evil" doctors. Think about pharm. companies that have "secretly" tested drugs on humans ... = disaster! By pushing research into secret or underground labs, ethical or moral policing of this research will become impossible and the sci-fi stories will come true.

    (2) For the North American Slashdot reader: If the U.S. and Canada continue to stifle this research, our countries will simply fall behind in this research, fall behind all the other countries in Europe and Asia that will continue on with this research. This is not a good thing. I know this sounds high and mighty from an American, but this scenario is NOT a good thing. If you live in the U.S. or Canada, YOU MUST EMAIL YOUR REPRESENTATIVES!

    (3) I already saw many replies to this post from people who are suffering for syndromes or diseases that not just COULD be erradicated by this research, but WOULD be erradicated by this research. If anybody wants to bring ethics and morals into this debate, they need to be willing to look at all vantage points. What morally outweighs the other? I think it is within our moral responsibility to continue quickly and strongly with this research in order to cure those who suffer. And if that means using bio waste (i.e., dead fetus tissue) in order to conduct that research, so be it. If that means paying willing participants (i.e., women and their own bodies) to assist in this research, so be it. Arguing against this research is no more sound than a pro-LIFEr KILLing an OBGYN and his staff at a clinic.
    • Although I do not condone killing the (willfully) ignorant, I understand the motivation for killing abortion abortion clinic personal as "killing the killers".

      At what point does a human embryo become a person with rights (legal and otherwise)? Keep in mind that:

      1. Abortion is legal up until birth,

      2. Neo-natal care has enabled children born at 25 weeks to survive,

      3. Many legal cases exist that charge a person with attempted murder, murder or child abuse of the fetus within a pregnant woman,

      4. Human babies are pretty much helpless the first few months after birth and that they show less intelligence than similarly aged animals of other species.

      5. Children are the property of their parents until they are 18 or legally emancipated.

      6. Some scientists have stated the goal of completely creating a human being outside the natural womb (making the term "birth" unapplicable)

      My personal views aside, this is not a consistant set of legal positions. The abortion issue is no more solved than the slavery issues was in the late 18th and early 19th century. Cloning and other related issues will be no better.

      If governments keep banning this and banning that in regards to embrionic and cloning research, all that is accomplished is the nightmare of an underground science community, "evil" doctors.

      Does this mean that since slavery was pushed underground and into countries with poor human rights policies after it was outlawed in most of the world that it should have been kept legal and in the open? Should the other countries of the world give up on reducing global emissions because the US governement has pooh-poohed the issue? Enforcement issues should not be used as an excuse to ignore morality. Even if research would continues in other countries, we have the moral obligation to do what is right, regardless of what anyone else is doing.

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