News Keep Your Laws Off My Body. I’m Pro-Cloning.
posted by on November 22 at 0:45 AM
Given the starring role that cloning technology has played in the whole stem cell debate, it’s weird that cloning isn’t even mentioned in yesterday’s accounts of the big news that embryos may no longer be needed to produce stem cells.
Check it out. Here’s yesterday’s NYT:
Two teams of scientists reported yesterday that they had turned human skin cells into what appear to be embryonic stem cells without having to make or destroy an embryo — a feat that could quell the ethical debate troubling the field.All they had to do, the scientists said, was add four genes. The genes reprogrammed the chromosomes of the skin cells, making the cells into blank slates that should be able to turn into any of the 220 cell types of the human body, be it heart, brain, blood or bone. Until now, the only way to get such human universal cells was to pluck them from a human embryo several days after fertilization, destroying the embryo in the process.
Similarly, from yesterday’s Washington Post:
Until now, only human egg cells and embryos, both difficult to obtain and laden with legal and ethical issues, had the mysterious power to turn ordinary cells into stem cells. And until this summer, the challenge of mimicking that process in the lab seemed almost insurmountable, leading many to wonder whether stem cell research would ever unload its political baggage.
The reports are right to talk about embryos. The act of destroying embryos is definitely one thing that made stem cell research controversial.
But the articles don’t even mention how the scientists actually made those controversial embryos. They made them by cloning.
The process for creating embryos to create stem cells worked like this: Cells were taken from a patient and injected into the emptied out nucleus of a donated egg cell. That egg cell then grew into a blastocyst-stage embryo that produced genetically identical stem cells to the original patient. Those stem cells could be used for therapeutic purposes.
That embryo could have also been used to make a clone. Exciting!
I’m kind of bummed that the excuse to pursue cloning technology has become irrelevant. And just one week after cloning technology scored such a p.r. coup with the monkey cloning story
Now that scientists can create stem cells out of cells without having to go through the cloning step, cloning doesn’t have much going for it.
That sucks. I wanted to see what was going to happen.
I hope yesterday’s big breakthrough in stem cell research doesn’t cause scientists to abandon research into cloning technology or cause a renewed push to outlaw cloning technology.
"But the articles don’t even mention how the scientists actually made those controversial embryos. They made them by cloning."
Huh. Clips from the NYT article you linked to above:
"The new method sidesteps other ethical quandaries, creating stem cells that genetically match the donor without having to resort to cloning or the requisite donation of women’s eggs."
"Until now, the only way most scientists thought such patient-specific stem cells could be made would be to create embryos that were clones of that person and extract their stem cells."
"But with the new method, human cloning for stem cell research, like the creation of human embryos to extract stem cells, may be unnecessary."
"Ever since the birth of Dolly the sheep in 1996, scientists knew that adult cells could, in theory, turn into embryonic stem cells. But they had no idea how to do it without cloning, the way Dolly was created."
"With cloning, researchers put an adult cell’s chromosomes into an unfertilized egg whose genetic material was removed."
The Washington Post article is more frugal, yet it also mentions cloning once as part of the process to create embryos for stem cells.
This, along with the bogus complaint that AFP didn't use the word "holocaust" in an article you posted a while back (they did - conveniently, you put ellipses in the part of the article you quoted where the word was used), I think creates a trend.
I don't get why people are so uptight about cloning yet refuse to take even the most simple step of offing at least one member of every set of twins.
Gotta love how George takes credit for the whole thing:
The White House said that Mr. Bush was “very pleased” about the new findings, adding that “By avoiding techniques that destroy life, while vigorously supporting alternative approaches, President Bush is encouraging scientific advancement within ethical boundaries.”
Cloning technology will still be pursued for livestock, where one needs to make whole critters (all with the same set of desirable traits), not just a body part here and there. And the new findings with the reprogrammed stem cells will probably make cloning easier, since the reprogramming step was the big hurdle, not the nuclear transplantation itself.
OK.
The donor egg cells were not technically cloned, but it did involve using egg cells without DNA, other than mitochondrial DNA (which comes from your mom ... always).
So, while not cloning per se, there was an egg involved, but it wasn't fertilized, it had the nucleus REPLACED. Using fusion.
So, depends on if you're a religious freak who thinks life starts at conception (then it's not a conception) or a scientist who thinks this whole religious objection to stem cells is just plain silly.
@2 - actually, a very very large fraction of twins either self-terminate one of the twins or it is absorbed. You have, inside your body, stem cells from all the children your mom ever had.
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