Stem Cell Research

[chickadeee]

I was listening to NPR today and they were talking about stem cell research, and that got me to wondering what other people, thought about this topic. I'm all for it and think Bush is hindering research that could save countless lives.

I completely support stem cell research and, like people who volunteer organs upon death, I think donating embryos is a noble and admirable thing.

 

[Harlan Norris]

I was listening to NPR today and they were talking about stem cell research, and that got me to wondering what other people, thought about this topic. I'm all for it and think Bush is hindering research that could save countless lives.

I'm curious, Just exactly what is stem cell recearch? What does it involve? And just how can it save lives?

 

[MarinoMan]

I would like to ask a few questions here:

1) What is the difference between a block a hundred cells (blastocyte), and a tumor? Both are living entities that cant survive with out a host. This is outside the body.
2) Are you willing to risk the life of cells that can't be turned into human life to save millions and millions of real, living people?
3) Why send these cells to waste...why not put them to good use?
4) Do you concider anything with human DNA to be alive and human?
5) If you were a complete vegetable (nobody's home), would you want to die? This is assuming you have no living will.

 

[Beastt]

Not that this is anything unusual but I'm quite confused by some of the concerns people express in offering support to Bush's limitations on research and his withdrawal of funds.

As has been stated time and time again, a blob of 100 or so cells has no sentience and doesn't contain the necessary organs to produce sentience. So unlike a person in a coma, there is absolutely no chance that it will ever attain sentience.

As far as it being viable in becoming a human, given the progress in cloning, the same could be said of almost every human cell. I doubt anyone would present that argument that it's inhumane to toss away a plucked hair because the living tissue clinging to the hair at the root contains the genetic code for a whole human.

And as far as living cells go, one could stretch the issue by including both living and dead cells. A dead sperm can still fertilize an egg. What it can't do is get itself to the egg. But if frozen, it still contains all the viable genetic material needed to cause an egg to begin dividing.

Is there anyone on the anti-research side who believes that every naturally fertilized egg makes it to the point of a detected pregnancy? I'll happily agree with anyone that there is a difference between a spontaneously aborted pregnancy in the earliest stages and the willful destruction of any form of life. But when there is no possibility for sentience, the rest becomes semantics and emotional responses not based in reality.

Women shed an egg every month and nobody suggests that it should be salvaged. Men also lose their reproductive genetic material with few, if any, ever expressing concern. When we begin to reduce human life to the existence of a few living cells, we forget that human life is about people, not blobs of cells. And if we can save people by using blobs of cells to find out more about life, disease and the better treatment of disease, any failure to do so is, in itself, inhumane.

I'll never understand all the people who want to defend the life of a small blob of frozen cells, yet readily dismiss the loss of more than 100,000 lives all due to the actions, directly or indirectly, of the same man. Perhaps the cry of some is; "save the cells, kill the people"!

 

[charityagape]

1- If we don't use them they just get thrown out so why not use them?

2- Adult stem cells are in limited supply and of limited use

I can't find the info on cord blood, but I know from experience that preserving it until it can be used is a very expensive prospect.

www.religioustolerance.org/res_stem.html

I don't know. I've been researching into it, and it seems adult stem cells are much more useful.

 

[Beastt]

I don't know. I've been researching into it, and it seems adult stem cells are much more useful.

You seem to be missing the point. Unless used for research, the cells you're wanting to protect are never going to be anything more than trash. We can either leave them frozen indefinitely, toss them out, or use them for life saving research. And as stated, adult stem cells are in short supply which slows research.

All around the country there are sperm banks with frozen sperm. Certainly only a tiny portion of this will ever be used to fertilize a human egg. So where is the outcry for the wasted sperm? Is this more tolerable because they're never used for anything? The only real difference is that Bush has put a face on these frozen cells and, as was likely planned, people rally behind that because they mistakenly believe that in doing so they're protecting a life. The groups of cells slated for research would never, ever, ever become a person no matter what is or isn't done with them. You can waste them or learn from them.

 

[MarinoMan]

I don't know. I've been researching into it, and it seems adult stem cells are much more useful.

I don't find this to be the case. ESC have the ability to become any cell in the human body while ASC are generally limited to differentiating into different cell types of their tissue of origin. ESC are very abundant and easy to attain while ASC are rare in mature tissues and methods for expanding their numbers in cell cultures have not yet been worked out. This is very important, seeing as how it takes large numbers of cells to preform therapies. The only advantage really is that a patients own stem cells could be taken from him/her, grown, and then reintroduced into the patient with no possiblity of rejection by the immune system. We still dont know if a person would reject donor ESC.

 

[charityagape]

I don't find this to be the case. ESC have the ability to become any cell in the human body while ASC are generally limited to differentiating into different cell types of their tissue of origin. ESC are very abundant and easy to attain while ASC are rare in mature tissues and methods for expanding their numbers in cell cultures have not yet been worked out. This is very important, seeing as how it takes large numbers of cells to preform therapies. The only advantage really is that a patients own stem cells could be taken from him/her, grown, and then reintroduced into the patient with no possiblity of rejection by the immune system. We still dont know if a person would reject donor ESC.

Are you sure we don't know? Or do they usually cause rejection?

http://www.globalchange.com/stemcells2.htm
Embryonic stem cells are also hard to control, and hard to grow in a reliable way. They have "minds" of their own, and embryonic stem cells are often unstable, producing unexpected results as they divide, or even cancerous growths. Human embryonic stem cells usually cause an immune reaction when transplanted into people, which means cells used in treatment may be rapidly destroyed unless they are protected, perhaps by giving medication to suppress the immune system (which carries risks).

http://www.nationalreview.com/interrogatory/interrogatory022601a.shtml
[font=Times New Roman, Times, serif] One distinct advantage of using our own adult stem cells is that there will be no transplant rejection, since it is our own tissue. Use of human embryonic stem cells will require lifelong use of drugs to prevent rejection of the tissue. Or, the patient will have to be cloned (a second ethical issue!), and that embryo (the patient's twin) sacrificed to obtain the embryonic stem cells for the tissue (essentially creating a human being whose only purpose is to be "harvested").[/font]

 

[charityagape]

I don't find this to be the case. ESC have the ability to become any cell in the human body while ASC are generally limited to differentiating into different cell types of their tissue of origin. ESC are very abundant and easy to attain while ASC are rare in mature tissues and methods for expanding their numbers in cell cultures have not yet been worked out. This is very important, seeing as how it takes large numbers of cells to preform therapies. The only advantage really is that a patients own stem cells could be taken from him/her, grown, and then reintroduced into the patient with no possiblity of rejection by the immune system. We still dont know if a person would reject donor ESC.

Are ASC's that limited? Are ESC's that much more valuable?

http://www.globalchange.com/stemcells2.htm
Take for example the work of Professor Jonathan Slack at Bath University who has shown how adult human liver cells can be transformed relatively easily into insulin producing cells such as those found in the pancreas, or the work of others using bone marrow cells to repair brain and spinal cord injuries in mice and rats, and now doing the same to repair heart muscle in humans.

http://www.nationalreview.com/interrogatory/interrogatory022601a.shtml
[font=Times New Roman, Times, serif]Adult stem cells have shown success at forming many specific tissues so far, certainly more than human embryonic stem cells in the laboratory[/font]

[font=Times New Roman, Times, serif][/font]

 

[Fantine]

The Korean cloning experiment interested me.

They used donor eggs, but the donor eggs were never fertilized by sperm. Instead, skin cells of seriously ill patients were fused to the eggs.

A cloned embryo is made from a single cell -- often a skin cell -- taken from the person or animal to be cloned, which is then fused to an egg from a donor. In the latest experiments, the team started with 185 eggs donated by 18 women. The women underwent a month-long series of hormone shots followed by the extraction of about a dozen ripened eggs from their ovaries. None of the women was paid.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/05/19/AR2005051900955_2.html

31 grew to the embryo stage.

But I don't know whether it was really "human life" or just skin cells developing and dividing in an optimal environment for growth. Would these skin cells fused to eggs ever have the possibility of becoming a baby? Or would they just have the power to heal the sick person from who they were taken?

My religious friends are very divided on this issue. There is not a single religious person I know who has a loved one with a disease that could be helped by stem cell research who doesn't support it wholeheartedly (even if they are very selective as to whom they share their feelings with, so as not to bring down ire upon their heads.)

 

[charityagape]

Fantine, that I don't know about. That opens the whole cloning and well its a difficult question to answer for myself, much less for anyone else.

I'm all for stem cell research, there are members of my family that could benefit, however, from the research I've done so far ASCs are much more useful than ESCs.

 

[sc4s2cg]

Hey now, we created the house, why can't we do with it what we will?

Alright, alright. Ill explain.

Let's I moved into a house. I didn't create it, Im just living there. Im paying my taxes, Im paying my daily loans, Im living. Can the government come in and destroy my house? They built it after all, but I bought it from them. Im living and breathing in it. They have no right to destroy my house. Now, I know what you're thinking so Ill explain something else. Why does G-d have the right to take our lives? He created our body and soul. He created all. Our soul bought the house, but he created our soul AND the body. The government built the house, which I bought, whom they didn't create.

And again..

In other words..you just admitted that we didn't create the soul, rather we created the "house" for the soul correct?

G-d bless,
sc

 

[MarinoMan]

Are you sure we don't know? Or do they usually cause rejection?

http://stemcells.nih.gov/info/basics/basics5.asp

Embryonic stem cells from a donor introduced into a patient could cause transplant rejection. However, whether the recipient would reject donor embryonic stem cells has not been determined in human experiments.

 

[MarinoMan]

Are ASC's that limited? Are ESC's that much more valuable?

ASC arn't that limited, but are more limited than ESC. ESC's as you said are far more difficult to control, but when you combine these cell with, lets say a skin cell, they become much less dangerous and easier to control.