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Here is a news story about a new study indicating that stem cells can be created from adult skin cells that have virtually all the properties of embryonic stem cells. In fact, they essentially are embryonic stem cells- just without using an embryo to get them.
Feel free to discuss... or not.
If any skin cells can be turned into stem cells, then doesn't that mean that any skin cell has the potential to become a human? After all stem cells can become any cell. That's all a zygote is - a stem cell divides and differentiates to become a complete organism.
This has serious implications! Getting sunburned and thus killing a few skin cells would be mass murder! Getting a tattoo would be forced cellular slavery! Not using a good dandruff shampoo would be disrespect for the unborn dead!
Someone call Ralph Reed! There's a guy in the corner with white flakes on his shoulders! Burn him! Burn the witch! Burn him!
If this turns out to be as promising as the article implies, I'll be extremely happy and relieved. The idea that we could pursue this kind of medical research without harvesting human embryos is tantalizing indeed. I confess that I've hoped for this kind of solution to the problem for a long time. It's a solution that I think all people, whatever their political or moral persuasion, can support, and a commendable meeting of science and morality.
Now let's hope that the research is sound and the results are reproducible.
Oh look who is having an adult conservation here. ~:eek:Quote:
Originally Posted by Aenlic
Good article by the way Xiahou if this pans out then I only see a postive outcome for medicial research - the researchers will have more options to discover cures for some of the worst medical conditions that affect man.
Interesting, though I'd suspect the article is understating the difficulties that are going to be involved in disentangling the stem DNA from the target DNA by several orders of magnitude.
I do see a potential for this to cause serious trouble down the line. If they go forward, and use these hybrid stems cells for research, then discover a cure for disease X without finding a way to disentangle the DNA, I'd expect rejection would be a rather serious risk in actually using the cells.
What happens then? Someone points out that rejection stops being a risk if they use the make embryo and break it up method instead of this method. And then it becomes a question of the value of a cloned embryo versus a living human. Not just embryo vs. potential cures, but embryo vs. cure. That would be one very very ugly issue.
I thought it addressed rejection.But Im hardly an authority- so I could be missing something.Quote:
Since the new stem cells in this technique are essentially rejuvenated versions of a person's own skin cells, the DNA in those new stem cells matches the DNA of the person who provided the skin cells. In theory at least, that means that any tissues grown from those newly minted stem cells could be transplanted into the person to treat a disease without much risk that they would be rejected, because they would constitute an exact genetic match.