Contrast this news with the big news from embryonic stem cells: cloned embryonic stem cells have been made... but they contain three sets of chromosomes and are therefore useless (!):
"There's one problem: the cells contain an extra set of chromosomes, which means they could never be used to grow tissues for transplantation from a patient's own cells – the ultimate goal. But having at last shown that there is no block to making cloned human stem cells, biologists are optimistic that it should be possible to find a solution to the chromosome problem."
In other words, the big news is that they still don't have a solution for a disease. Or even a viable source of (ethical?) stem cells. In fact, this process appears to be a side road to adult stem cells. They are taking an individual's skin cells, fusing them with an "unfertilized human egg", and hoping to create an egg containing cloned stem cells for an already born person.
But these appear to be unnecessary due to the tsunami of adult stem cell solutions which are already coming on-line. But there are government grants for messing around with human eggs, so someone will take them up on it.
But another issue arises: read the following while keeping a straight face:
"they were able to pay women to donate their eggs for research"
In other words, they bought eggs from women: they created a market for human eggs. The "donation" angle is untenable; the women were already being paid for their eggs. They expanded the market for eggs into the area of destructive research.
Indeed, Egli used to work in the lab of Kevin Eggan at the Harvard Stem Cell Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who this week describes his team's abject failure to find women who were prepared to donate their eggs for free for similar experiments.
In the US, women are typically paid several thousand dollars when donating their eggs to infertile couples undergoing IVF, compensating for the time and discomfort involved. The New York team piggybacked on this process by asking women who had already decided to donate if they wanted to provide eggs for research, instead. Those who agreed were then paid the same $8000 fee given to IVF egg donors.
Approaching women who were already committed to donating their eggs "was quite creative", says Insoo Hyun, a bioethicist at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. He believes the approach reduces concerns about women being lured to donate for financial reasons. But ethical objections to the research will remain, as isolating hESCs still involves destroying a blastocyst embryo."
Creating a market for eggs to be cloned, grown into a blastocyst, then destroyed? Proving once again that ungrounded "ethics" is relative, and that science is not a repository for ethical standards. Moreover, the $8,000 per egg is undoubtedly coming out of taxpayer pockets.
4 comments:
There is war going on where thousands are dying, while millions elsewhere starve... and you're going on about goo in a dish.
You seem to have difficulty understanding the articles from which you quoted. Or, perhaps, as a Christian the concepts of evidence and accuracy are foreign to you?
Just as an example of how clearly you've cherry picked your quotes and how you've tried to rig this post to ring emotional bells, we'll look at just a couple of points.
Immediately following your last quoted paragraph you purposefully ommitted the following:
It may also be difficult for other groups to follow the New York team's lead. Some ethical guidelines, including those adopted in 2005 by the US National Academy of Sciences, frown upon paid donations – and in California, paying for eggs for use in research is prohibited by law.
So much for your last paragraph and your childish and ridiculous comments about ethics.
Finally, you conclude with an "undoubtedly" yet you have no evidence whatsoever for your claim. Sure it makes a great emotional point. Too bad it's just rhetoric. But then, you're a Christian, so you have no problems at all making stuff up then presenting it as if it's true.
Ginx,
Your concern for the war(s) and starving is commendable, what are you doing about it? Tell us all what your solutions are, and your activities in their implementation: we are eager for answers to these problems.
Anonymous,
Man-up: Take some responsibility for your comments and choose a moniker. I don't continue conversations with "anonymous" drive-by bomb throwers.
The scientists in question did what they did under NY law; their ethics are not questioned so far as I know, and they certainly did not question their own ethics.
And your pointing to the NAS and California law which are against such actions merely reinforces the opinion that it is unethical. Plus it indicates that you agree(!) since you pointed it out.
And your comment about Christians lying, your evidence for that is...? You present that as a universal truth, yet without evidence. Are evidence and accuracy foreign to you??
But you are right, I made an unfounded assumption, although I did not claim it to be fact. So I have googled around some. Here is the only information on funding that I have found, from Health News site:
"The study was funded solely with private funding and adhered to ethical guidelines adopted by the American Society for Reproductive Medicine and the International Society for Stem Cell Research, as well as protocols reviewed and approved by the institutional review board and stem cell committees of Columbia University."
While I could not confirm this on the NYSC site, I'll take it as fact, and retract my comment about taxpayer funding. However, this seems to confirm that ASRM, ISSCR, and Columbia University as well as NYSCF are ethically out of step with NAS and the laws of the State of California, not to mention common sense.
If you are for creating a market for human eggs, please make your case. Your post served only to register your hatred for Christians, and not your position on embryonic stem cells.
I have donated a lot of blood, but no sperm and I have no eggs to sell. That makes it a discriminatory market, excluding half the population based solely on sex. The Left must surely rise up against that?
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