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."
follow-up story... (Score:4, Funny)
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Informative? (Score:2)
It's a few years before they'll actually start shooting scientists.
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I did ask for it. Thanks so much!!
Where the heck is my brain hammer?
As mentioned on Fark... (Score:5, Funny)
Futurama (Score:5, Funny)
Farnsworth: As a man it has become too much of a chore for me to clean out my wrinkles each day. Is it true that stem cells may fight the aging process?
Geneworks Woman: Well yes, in the same way an infant may fight Muhammed Ali! But -
Farnsworth: One pound of stem cells please.
Won't somebody think of the children? (Score:2)
The Wisconsin paper is not in Nature (Score:2, Informative)
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/1151526 [sciencemag.org]
Hope it works (Score:3, Informative)
This is Incredibly Exciting to me (Score:2, Insightful)
How will the skin get harvested? (Score:2)
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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.
Viable (Score:5, Informative)
The issue people have with stem cell research is not stem cells per se, but that the harvesting of embryonic stem cells results in the destruction of a viable human.
Remember, religious people haven't had issues with adult stem cell research -- which this is. It's only embryonic stem cell research and SCNT processes which result in a viable human that people take ethical issues with.
If this can directly transform a skin cell into heart cells or whatever without moving through an "embryonic" state, then it's really the best of both worlds.
Re:Viable (Score:5, Informative)
Remember, religious people haven't had issues with adult stem cell research
It's always been false to blame "religious nuts" as being the only ones against harvesting embryonic stem cells. I'm an atheist, and I'm very uncomfortable with the idea of medical experiments on viable humans.
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As someone pointed out earlier, if the most viable route to get stem cells is harvesting embryos, the demand will be so huge as to create an economic incentive for people to make as many of them as they can sell stem cells.
And that is plain ugly.
If we cross that barrier, how long until we start usi
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Go to your local fertility clinic. They toss out quite a few unused embryos with the remaining placed in cryopreservation. So, tossing them out or experimenting on them? Which one do you think is more useful?
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I stretched the argument to the point of nearly breaking so I think you did not get it completely.
I am totally in when it comes to growing beef in vitro and not taking it out of cows - they sure have feelings and they sure would not be very happy
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I still don't see the issue with that unless the embryos grew central nervous systems first. Otherwise, who cares? People eat placentas, and those are composed of human genetic material.
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Why are you okay with killing cows which are pretty much more intelligent and sentient/alive than a bunch of "cells"?
On the related note, what is your take on nail-biting? or chewing lip skin that many kids do? OMG!!! Cannibalism! Cannibalism is taboo due to mostly mutual self-preservation instincts. Extending it to non-intelligent cells is plain sil
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Are you responding to the right post? I was saying that agnosticism is a blanket statement - it covers all concepts of a deity. Being agnostic in regards to the Flying Spaghetti Monster is a meaningless concept; if you're agnostic, you're agnostic.
The same goes for an
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I lack the faith required to say "Zeus does not exist" or "Allah does not exist" (it also seems remarkably unsafe to say so in certain countries these days) and so on up to the blanket "no such thing as a god exists". I will never be able to proof their non-existence and thus, I cannot affirm they do not exist. It sure seems likely, as all evidence in favor of the existence of even one of them is very faint, but it is still n
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You're practically the only one. Almost everyone else opposed to embryonic stem cell research has a religious affiliation.
I think that's more a function of religious people having an organized voice that makes it into the media.
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Says a lot about George Bush and the republicans.
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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! Y
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125 cells doesn't know anything about dignity. You do know that's what there talking about right? not the little people like embryo's they show on TV all the time.
More of your cells dies while reading this, did you give them a death with dignity?
You must also be against artificial insemination, because that provides excess cells; Which, btw, are the ones used fo stem cell research. That right, cells that would be discarded anyways.
"And there's
Re:Viable (Score:4, Insightful)
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!"
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Does "viable chance" mean "if left to its own devices", or does it mean "if helped along just right"?
In the former case, embryos created by cloning clearly don't have a viable chance; they need to be surrounded by exactly the right nutrients and implanted into a receptive female at the exact right time
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And here we find an honest admission of the endgame for the anti-abortion crowd.
A lot of the emotional damage is actually done by abortion advocates telling rape victims that the baby is a horrible inhuman thing that should be killed.
Ummm... HUH?? I don't even know if strawman is quite strong enough here. I suppose it's possible that you've met the one rape counselor out of thousands that has actually said this, but... as an F
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Said the scientist as he threw the Bag O' Embryoes into the trash can.
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These stem cells are probably more or less equivalent to those embryonic stem cells, except if they were given the half a year plus of intensive development in a womb they'd grow up to be a clone, which is e
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It's not the end of the debate though. (Score:4, Interesting)
You'd think everybody is in favor of longevity, but one of Bush's early science advisers made it clear that he was opposed to life extension in principle and Bush explicitly backed him up on that. It blew me away, but they clearly were making the case in favor of death. Personally, I was shocked at this and I brought it up with some people in my family and I was even more surprised to find that a lot of the older people were sympathetic to the idea that death was something that shouldn't be messed with.
Personally, I say fuck that. Ya'll can be my witnesses, I want to live as long as freakin' possible and if I end up lookin' like Frankenstein carrying my head in the jar in the crook of my sewn on arm then all the better. Sounds good to me.
Some of the arguments in favor of death are kinda lame. I've heard the economic argument over and over. This is a popular one. It's like the economy would get all screwed up if people stopped dying on seventy year clocks because all the old geezer's saving would just accumulate insane interests until the oldest people had all the money. Okay, I can see that but this is not a good reason for people to die. Money aint that big a deal if we all had indefinite life spans. I'm sure we could calmly negotiate something once everyone had matured a few hundred years.
Another pro-death argument is the idea of overpopulation. I think I have a sweet answer to this one and this is what I really wanted to post about. See, the key is that you've got to have an answer that appeals to a really silly level of religious symbolism and I think I got it.
What you do is, you say that anybody who wants to extend their life past a certain age and have children will have to voluntarily exile themselves into orbit or the moon or some other place off the surface of the earth. This is the perfect solution. Why? Because, the result is that the people who accept eternal life can only do so if they . . . wait for it. . . go to heaven.
Is that sweet or what?
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Errr, no, that's not how retirement usually works. Look at it this way -- do the really old people in your community look like they're rolling in money? Warren Buffett will earn interest way in excess of his spending (and in excess of inflation) but your typical 150-year-old is unlikely to have enou
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That's wealth, not taxable income or earned income, which aren't a really accurate measure of the wealth of a retired person. You'll always hear those inaccurate numbers quoted to make it seem like old folks are destitute, however, which justifies massive government spending to buy their extremely reliable votes.
You can read more about it here:
Thomas Sowell income confusion artic [townhall.com]
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As for overpopulation.. there's an (as good as) infinite am
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References, please? My google-fu isn't up to finding any such quote from Bush. I would expected such an explicit opposition to life to have generated quite a furor among the pro-life community...
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I can pretty much support the case against extending their lives. I am just surprised they agree.
But let's not exaggerate our enthusiasm with that specific idea. I am also sure it will take more than their natural lifetimes to undo all the
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Stem Cells play an important part in the closest thing we have to an engineering roadmap to cure aging [sens.org].
They're not a silver bullet, and shouldn't be treated as such, but it's a crucial piece that both directly addresses some of the causes of aging, and significantly complements our biomolecular toolbox, which in turn we are and will be using to solve a miriad of other problems.
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So life extension is against God. Personally, I'd expect that if an omnipotent god said nobody is going to live longer than 120 years it really wouldn't matter what anybody did, but apparently God needs the help of us poor peons to make sure his edicts are enforced. And that Noah... he's the worst of all. He lived WAY more than 120 years, even AFTER the decree!
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not to mention that while medicines have progressed considerably, no major disease seems to be completely curable without life-long medication.
Sadly this is due to the fact that very little research is done to find cures.
Some of course is done, mostly in research, hospital, and university levels, which is almost the longest point to a usable treatment one can get, but it is better than nothing.
Most if not every last pharma company has a negative value interest in finding cures. Cures cut into profit margins. Treating symptoms for the rest of a persons life is what they want, thus all they look into doing.
I'd hope that once the richest people ca
Someone is going to bash me but... (Score:2, Insightful)
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Lentiviral Gene Delivery... (Score:2, Informative)
The debate will never end (Score:3, Interesting)
One day (probably in the far distant future) the science-types will work out how to assemble (from scratch, no less) one (1) Hew-Man Being(patent-pending, tm, etc most likely) without the mess involved with "an embryo".
What you gonna do now?
You think this is insanely unlikely? (remember folks, people once thought it insanely unlikely the earth was NOT the center of the universe)
Until it's born, it's "an embryo". Of course essentially the same thing occurring as "just a bunch of separate organs" is (by definition) not "an embryo" although (in theory, so far) you could piece the jigsaw-puzzle together in "an assembl-O-mat" and produce a walking-talking fully-functional human.
And maybe we won't do it that way - maybe we'll just use full nano-assembley and build him (or her) one atom at a time.
At what point do you differentiate between "a human" (or "a person") and something that was literally designed and manufactured by "those geeks in Building C" you see in the cafeteria some days?
Do they deserve any rights? Rights the same as "the rest of us" or not? (anyone seen Blade Runner lately?)
Should "they" be any less worthy simply because we fully understand how they came to be, and can control that process?
Does anyone else in this room find it odd and unsettling that the very same people who are so against killing people before they're born are constantly requisitioning more funds from congress in order to kill people after they've been born? (well, very long after. And "those people" aren't "my people" so that makes it fair and just, doesn't it?)
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I've heard this line of critique before, and am at least somewhat sympathetic considering the loudest mouths in American politics. All the same, bear in mind that
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And the transcendentally magical definining change between a 7.9 week old "embryo" and a 8.0 week old "fetus" is
Yes, that's right folks - until it's reached the 'fetus' stage, it's really stretching a technicality to consider "the thing" in any way "one of us".
This whole embryo/fetus dichotomy is purely so that someone somewhere can feel good about themselves performing certain classes of experiments.
Re:The science! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:The science! (Score:5, Insightful)
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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
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Actually, the Roe vs. Wade [wikipedia.org] surpreme court decision has this effect. The regulatory authority of the government changes based on the trimester.
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?
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Here is another argument in your own vein.
People want to eat. Eating is not bad in itself, but it is a minor version of eating poison, or even worse, cannibalism. Eating food can lead to cannibalism if you are not careful. Do you allow eating?
If you do not provide the same answer in *this* instance as well, can you explain why?
Care to do it *before* you die from starvation btw?
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".
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Nonsense. One does not have to be a Christian to have ethics. It's not about who is or who is not "alive" it's about what rights an organism has. Even animals that we use for food have the right not to be tortured. Millions of people across the country will be eating Turkey this week, I doubt that many of them think it would be ok to torture those turkeys before they're slaughtered for food.
Nice strawman! Animals have the right not to be tortured, but they do not have the right to not to be killed? You
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No, they are both the same questions with different variables. Both are examples of slippery slope arguments. Why is that argument valid or invalid in one case and not in the other?
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No hard feeling?:P
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The issue has always been one of a single, very important definition. What qualifies as a Human Being, deserving of human rights and what doesn't. Where is the cutoff? If there are multiple levels, what delineates them?
Most will agree (although, some even will hold fast here) that the individual germ cells are not deserving of separate human rights prior to conception
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.
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Quite frankly, up until this point, everything about stem cells was about ethics. That is what makes this story so humongous.
The annoying thing is that they're still trying to act like this is about ethics, like this is some kind of victory. We're seeing obnoxious comments [bbc.co.uk] from "pro-life" groups about how "Finally the scientists are seeing the light and having some common sense", as if they couldn't take the guilt any more.
But (taken from the article above):
Prof Wilmut [the guy who cloned Dolly the sheep] said: "We've not made this decision because it's ethically better.
"To me it's always been ethically acceptable to think that if you could use cells from a human embryo to develop a treatment for a disease like motor neurone disease, for which there is no treatment at present, then that is an acceptable thing to do."
I'm almost disappointed that this new technique has been developed. This means that now politicians can safely oppose stem-cell research, and people won't have to think abo
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?
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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
Re:The science! (Score:5, Interesting)
And that is where we disagree. And I'm sure you can understand this line of thought even if you don't agree with it. It goes to the question of what is a human deserving of human rights. We consider it a unique being with DNA, post-fertilization.
We find this definition has a scientific and ethical clearity that can avoid a lot of the horrors of history that now (most of) humanity regrets based on what counts as a human worthy of protection.
We've found your previous and current standards of tribe/religion/family/ethnicity/sexuality/age/disability/ or simply 'might makes right' distinctions to be unworthy of our species.
So you disagree - so if we are not persuasive, are we at least not 'stupid?'
you don't get to claim this is some kind of victory
To quote Jerry Sienfeld's response when he was told he was not in listed in the top 10 of comedians in the history of America but was instead number twelve, I'll take it.
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How about a cell taken from your skin, sitting in a petri dish? Human or not? Does the UN Declaration of Human Rights apply? Pretty soon we will be able to take that cell, put it into just the right soup of nutrients and chemicals, and it will grow into a copy of you. Do you now count it as a human, just because of this possibility?
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?
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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 indivi
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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.
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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
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[flamebait]
when it can breathe and form a thought on it's own
[/flamebait]
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To clarify - that would be my definition of the point where it becomes a human. Before that it is a potential human, after that - it is a corpse.
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Even someone lacking in brain cells would know the answer to this question and wouldn't even have bothered asking it. But regardless :
What test must be passed before deciding that a sperm and egg is not "alive" but a fertilized ovum egg is? Who are you to decide that the sperm or an egg is not really "alive"? After all an
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At the risk of feeding a troll, I will at least attempt a brief answer.
Who's deciding what is "alive" and what is not? Of course sperm and egg are living, as they are not dead. They are not distinct entities, but when they combine they become a thing that is distinct from either of its parents, and is still alive. Whether it goes on the develop properly, or whether it is viable outside the womb, is not the point. It is a living human thing that is not identical with either parent, which is the important di
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.
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I don't remember being a baby. So is it OK to do scientific experiments on babies then? That's my point. While one person thinks it's OK to experiment on babies, another may say that it's OK to experiment on babies as long as they haven't
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I would guess it more likely that the breakthrough will be held back by people who don't want their skin to turn to stem cells before their eyes because of some virus escaped from the research labs.
Then again, someone's probably already claimed movie rights on t
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"Would you kindly kill me?" -- Andrew Ryan, founder of Rapture
Re:This won't stop them turning it into an issue.. (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:This won't stop them turning it into an issue.. (Score:2, Interesting)
i mean after all wtf is wrong with playing god? if we listened to these whacko's we'd still be praying on our needs in a dirt hut.
If i was a rich billionaire i'd pump shit tins of money into stem cell research and have them make me some kind of catdog style animal.
Wow! That's not only a troll, but 100% Grade-A Certified Organic FUD!
Conserva
COME ON SLASHDOT!!! MOD PARENT UP! (Score:2)
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This is really a questionable statement. People had been getting grant money to do embryonic stem research well before Bush became president. He became the first to create a specific category of NIH funding towards stem cell research, but that was with the major caveat that you could only use existing stem cell lines which in effect froze embryonic stem cell research in the US and set it back 5 years. It's akin to setti
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This is really a questionable statement. People had been getting grant money to do embryonic stem research well before Bush became president. He became the first to create a specific category of NIH funding towards stem cell research, but that was with the major caveat that you could only use existing stem cell lines which in effect froze embryonic stem cell research in the US and set it back 5 years. It's akin to setting aside NSF funds for space exploration research but then saying you can only use Legos
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There are a ton of reasons to create new lines. First the technology used to create all of those lines relied on mouse "feeder cells" which the stem cells grew on. This resulted in widespread contamination of these cells with mouse antigens which not only makes them poor models of how natural stem cells function but also means you can't ever transplant them to humans. Second, growing cells in culture almost always eventually causes them to undergo gen
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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,
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?
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I'm off to blow my nose now, and flush the kleenex down the toilet.