stem cells

[theapportioner]

Should we or shouldn't we? I work with them so it's clear where my thoughts lie...

[Brandon]

No problems here.

[Buffalo Tom]

Should we or shouldn't we? I work with them so it's clear where my thoughts lie...

In bucolic bliss in the middle of a field of the English countryside?

No problems here, either. I mean, unborn chickens grace millions of greasy breakfast plates every day. It's a natural progression to start exploiting unborn humans.

[ziggytrix]

Can you harvest embryonic stem cells without abortions?

If not, then it breaks down into another choice argument, and I'm about as sick of those as a person can get.

[kellychaos]

Well, the medical world's spin is to say that doctors would only be using the stem cells of those babies that were going to be aborted anyway. Conspiracy theorists would have you believe that the need would force some immoral doctors to "make" abortions of otherwise healthy babies ... sort of a Michael Palmer anxiety disorder.

[theapportioner]

Can you harvest embryonic stem cells without abortions?

Of course. You can in vitro fertilize an egg with a sperm and have it go to the point in development where you have embryonic stem cells. And by the time most people have abortions, the embryo or fetus cells have begun differentiation - for ES cells you need to go earlier. Under the right conditions, ES cells can proliferate on and on, a process called 'self-renewal'.

One can also combine someone else's ES cell or an egg with a nucleus from one of your own cells, to have all the differentiated cells be of the same genetic code as yours. If it works, it would get around problems of donor rejection. Unfortunately, this technology, known to science as somatic nuclear transfer, is often called 'cloning'.

[kellychaos]

That made me think of a rally funny Simpson's episode. Unfortunatlely, I don't think that I furthered this discussion in any relevant way by this recollection.