Stem cell research ethics- a 5 or 6 days old embryo right to life!

[SPJ]

If you are sick, the doctor may extract DNA from your skin. He or she then injects your DNA into an egg. They remove the DNA from the egg. The "fertilized" egg then grows in the media and divides into an embryo. If not intervened, the egg may be carried inside a mother's womb to full term and delivered. It is a clone of you.

The doctor may extract the stem cells from the embryo to grow into organs that you need to replace. Since the organ will carry the same antigen determinants from your body. It will not be rejected.

However, the embryo will be destroyed or a clone of you or a life will be destroyed in the process.

Here is a link:

tax dollar funding stem cell research (http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20050520/ap_on_go_co/stem_cells_congress_3)

What are your comments?

:confused: :( :mad: :eek:

[SifuAbel]

technically its not an embryo, its still a zygot egg that would just as soon be flushed in menstruation. No matter what side of whatever issue one has its always about selective death. "its ok to kill some, but not others. "

But this won't matter much soon since many more alternative sources for "clean" stem cells are being discovered.

[SifuAbel]

This page puts a "face" to the problem. Check out what 5 days is really.

http://www.biology.iupui.edu/biocourses/N100/2k4ch39repronotes.html


"The first 3 weeks are the most hazardous periods in your life. Roughly one third to one half of all fertilized zygotes never make it beyond this point. "

[Yum Cha]

Is destroying an embryo/zygote "just"

Is abortion "just"

Are forgotten or neglected children "just"

Are children left to die in poverty "just"

Can you claim ethical mandates for one without the other?

By the time all the extro-uterine children are receiving their justice, then I'd be prepared to start talking about the issue on a cellular level.

Ideologues that ignore reality kill more people than stem cell research.

[Ben Gash]

"The first 3 weeks are the most hazardous periods in your life."
The last three are pretty ropey.
Using cloned cells from you is more of a grey area for me than the earlier/current methods of randomly extracting stem cells. After all, technically the cells are you.
It certainly is a tricky area though.When does life begin?What is life?

[IronFist]

They need to find out when consciousness enters the body.

[SanSoo Student]

I personally think that they are free cells at that stage, since the brain did not start to develop yet.

[Merryprankster]

Yes "just an embryo/zygote."

"Life begins at conception," is a relatively new concept. For CENTURIES, the Judeo-Christian tradition held that a fetus before "quickening" was not a life. A miscarriage as the result of a severe beating, for instance, was only considered a double homicide after quickening had occured. Quickening is the point at which the mother can feel movement. This was accepted as a tenet of common and religious law....

This rose out of the concept of "ensoulment." Ensoulment was only considered to have occurred once movement began. After all, a dead person, without a soul, does not move. The soul, being the spiritual source of life, is required for human animation.

Intuitively, a mere collection of human cells is not a person. A human liver is not a person. A human toe is not a person. Why should an embryo/zygote (ESPECIALLY A ZYGOTE!) be considered a person? Because somebody randomly decided that "life begins at conception?" There's certainly no biblical evidence for this at all, and religious history does not support that interpretation.

SifuAbel is also correct: some studies have suggested the body "self-aborts," in up to 75% or so of all fertilized cases (I think). This implies that there is more to life than mere conception.

All in all, there is serious wisdom in the current legal standard for abortion: viability. Abortion is legal as long as the fetus cannot survive outside the womb. Right now, viability is around 5 months I think. That is a significant decrease from the, say, 7 months or so that it was when the Supreme Court made that decision. As our technology gets better, the term of viability decreases....pretty clever bit of legal wording if you ask me. Lets the SC off the hook, and negates the need for a further ruling on the issue.

[Golden Tiger]

"Thomas said extra appendages result of a cellular mix up during the replication of genetic material in early embryo development. Certain cells will develop into tissues such as muscles or organs, but some receive skewed signals and grow into unnecessary parts."

http://apnews.myway.com/article/20050520/D8A6IVO81.html



Mother nature has a hard time getting it right after millions of trying.....and here we think that we can "one up" her........hmmmmmmm

[Mr Punch]

"The first 3 weeks are the most hazardous periods in your life."
The last three are pretty ropey.LMAO. My gf was just asking me what the hell I was laughing at!

BTW, MP is totally on the ball.

I would add that all of these emotionally stunted religious tards should keep their noxious morals out of saving people and solving some of the serious problems of genetic disease. But that's possibly because my morals are noxious too :D .

On the other hand, there's a lot to be said for Yum Cha's opinion that science should be looking at ways of solving problems for the people who made it into the light of day.

And there's something else to be said for the opinion that we should just let people die...

[PangQuan]

I always thought that the "quickening" was when you cut the head off an immortal.

like this (http://us.movies1.yimg.com/movies.yahoo.com/images/hv/photo/movie_pix/dimension_films/highlander__endgame/adrian_paul/highlander.jpg)

there can be only one.

[Chief Fox]

Here's what i would like to see happen. When you're born, the doctors automatically make a clone of you. This clone is engineered to not have a brain only a stem cell to keep the body alive. Then in life you just use this clone as a parts clone. Just incase you need a kidney or some other organ, or blood, bone marrow, what ever.

Then you get another clone when you're 20, another one when you're 40 and so on and so forth.

All kidding aside. I'm not sure just because we can do something means that we should. BUT I'm sure I would feel differently if I was one who was sick.

[SifuAbel]

If this is going to stem into another pro life/ pro choice issue, lets then note what each side really is. Because , people tend not realize that they are not really argueing on the same mirror.

The only real commonality between the two camps is the civil liberties of the woman.

Think about it, if we were to actually mirror each side it would be more like this

Pro choice v. pro govenment control

Pro life v. pro death.

Neither of which is neccesarily connected to each other in the same arguement.

Someone who is pro choice isn't always pro death. It is about maintaining civil liberties and setting limits to govenmental control over a womans body. The right of the woman to choose what avenue she wishes to take. This might also include the choice of keeping the child or at least choose the adoption process. Of which, should be the role of religious foundations to council and sway opinion, not act as a controlling body as it has been for centuries.

[SifuAbel]

I think the only way for men to relate to this is if they can imagine a govenmental policy that limits how long a man can have his testicles or how many arms are allowed or manditorially give up all doubled organs.

[PangQuan]

Dude, I am all for cloning personally. You know its going to happen. If not now try 500 years in the future on a station out in space orbiting who knows what, where the only laws are the ones put down by the people who own the station.

I think having a clone would be pretty tight. If I get enough I could form an army of strom troopers. How else are we going to defeat the robots?

[Golden Tiger]

I think the only way for men to relate to this is if they can imagine a govenmental policy that limits how long a man can have his testicles or how many arms are allowed or manditorially give up all doubled organs.

A human (man or woman) is born with 2 arms and males are born with testicles (some a tad bigger than others). Basic biology unless you want to get into mutations. On the other hand, NO woman has ever been born pregnant. Therefore, you are talking apples and oranges until we evolve into beings that can reproduce asexually.

As for a man to relate to this, how did the woman get preggers in the first place? There is NO government policy (other than statutory laws) that deny a woman the right to have sex, so it is a CHOICE. People want pro choice, there you go. But with choices come consequences. You made your bed, now you have to sleep in it. Except of course that we have turned into a nation of "it's someone else's fault, not mine" people.


Anyhoo......

S. Korea now has 11 differentiated lines.....they are rocking in the field.