Stem cell research

[Enigma'07]

Where does life begin. I'm thinking somewhere between conception and birth, I really don't know though. Also, sould embryoes be used for the research? I think that we should use what's availible, but not go crazy with it.

 

[daveleau]

I think the problem arises in the fact that abortion farms would possibly pop up and just like there are places where men and women can donate their gametes for money, people would turn their unwanted pregnancy into a profit.

I believe that life begins at conception. The world wants us to believe otherwise, but Scripture does not differentiate between a baby of 2 days post conception versus a baby of 2 months post conception or a baby 2 months after birth.

 

[SumTinWong]

I believe that all life happend before the beginning of time. There are verses that speak to God knowing some from the womb, and John the Baptist was filled with the Holy Spirit while still in the womb.

As far as stem cell research I am all for it if it is done on embylical (SP?) cords, which from what I understand is a valid way to use them. ANy other way I am not so sure I am a fan of.

 

[eldermike]

I think all life began at the logos (John 1:1).

If you think about the way we phrase the question and turn the discussion to a question to God and not to me, it's eaiser to understand. Something like: God, when do you first meet your creation?

 

[TwinCrier]

There are far more stem cells in the umbilical cord of a live birth child then in a tiny, aborted fetus.

 

[Enigma'07]

There are far more stem cells in the umbilical cord of a live birth child then in a tiny, aborted fetus.

Do you have some scientific backing for this, if so that would be really cool! I'm discussing the matter with my bio teacher and would like to share that with her.

Couple of critisisms. 1, I've heard that over 80% of fertilized eggs do not
actually every grow into a fetus, and that most all of
the times, the egg leaves the uterus before the woman
even noticesses she's pregnant. If that's so, then
isn't that alot of persons dying before they reach the
age of accountability? 2, there's alot of
embryoes that are just frozen, the majority of them
will never develop into a fetus. If that's so, then
why not use them for something; or is it that a person
cannot be treated as a resource such as an animal?

 

[ZiSunka]

What you've heard is wrong. It is the propaganda of the abortion proponents and not based on any scientific facts or research. No one knows or can know how many fertilized eggs are spontaneously aborted before the mother knows she's pregnant. Think about it. If the woman doesn't know she's pregnant, how can some scientist in some distant lab know she is??

As for the frozen embryos, as long as they are intact, there is the possibility that they will someday be able to mature into human babies. But as soon as they are ground up for "research," there life is over and they have NO chance of ever being anything other than a sophiticated science fair project. Plus, research is showing that donated stem cells from a non-self donor (embryonic stem cells) are much less reliable and much more likely to be rejected or cause horrible problems because the body doesn't "turn" them off at the right time. Virtually every experiment using embryonic cells in humans has gone awry, sometimes with very bad effects. One trial using embryonic stem cells to treat parkinson's diease went so bad that the people were actually much worse off than the people who had no treatment whatsoever. All of the subjects who got the treatment are now dead, after suffering greatly with the aftereffects of having the stem cells go wild inside their brains. I won't get into the graphic details.

Another one in Pittsburgh was supposed to "cure" juvenile diabetes. Everything had worked perfectly in mice and other animals, so they moved on to human trials. everyone of the subjects who received the stem cell treatmenst developed severe deformities in their pancreases. The trail was abandoned after only a few months because the outcomes were so prevalent and so bad.

But in experiments with self-donated stem cells, and your fatty tissues are loaded with them, no such weird and awful uncontained growths happened. Your body knows when and how to shut off it's own stem cells. It can't do that with embryonic cells because it just doesn't recognize them as something that can be shut off, much like cancer cells. Your immune system may respond, but not appropriately.

So, embryonic stem cells do not make good transplants, AND it is worng to think of some human beings as existing solely to provide spare parts for other human beings. A human is valuable in the fact that they exist and that they are of our own species, not in the idea that they are somehow "useful" to someone who has the money to take their lives to harvest stem cells.

Human beings are not disposable, and that's my final answer.

 

[TwinCrier]

Do you have some scientific backing for this, if so that would be really cool! I'm discussing the matter with my bio teacher and would like to share that with her.

Couple of critisisms. 1, I've heard that over 80% of fertilized eggs do not
actually every grow into a fetus, and that most all of
the times, the egg leaves the uterus before the woman
even noticesses she's pregnant. If that's so, then
isn't that alot of persons dying before they reach the
age of accountability? 2, there's alot of
embryoes that are just frozen, the majority of them
will never develop into a fetus. If that's so, then
why not use them for something; or is it that a person
cannot be treated as a resource such as an animal?

http://www.betterhumans.com/Errors/index.aspx?aspxerrorpath=/searchEngineLink.article.2003-06-16-5.aspx
http://stemcells.alphamedpress.org/cgi/content/abstract/21/1/50
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99993643
You may also find information on most pro-life websites.

1) yes fetuses like people in other stages of developement, die of disease or natural causes. That does not justify the deliberate destruction of life.
2) That many embyos are frozen and will never be given the chance to develope is an unfortunate situation, but certainly one that doe not justify the purposful destruction of life.

 

[JVD]

Just two days ago I listened to an interview on PBS of all things the owner of a company that took adult stem cells and used them to help that adult. This is a company that does not yet have products on the market but is coming close Apparently there are stem cells in most of our organs. Even in our skin. We can become self-donors and this will greatly reduce the rejection problem. The interviewee said that science was moving away from embyonic research into adult stem cell research and that was where the future of stem cell technology was headed.

I think the radio program was call Technation

 

[GreenEyedLady]

Just two days ago I listened to an interview on PBS of all things the owner of a company that took adult stem cells and used them to help that adult. This is a company that does not yet have products on the market but is coming close Apparently there are stem cells in most of our organs. Even in our skin. We can become self-donors and this will greatly reduce the rejection problem. The interviewee said that science was moving away from embyonic research into adult stem cell research and that was where the future of stem cell technology was headed.

I think the radio program was call Technation

I heard this also. This woman was one of the first cases that they tried it on and its WORKING!
There is no need to mess with unborn children. A child is a child, from the beginning!
GEL

 

[Enigma'07]

I won't get into the graphic details.

Can you provide an article or something, just curious...

Adult stem cells are not the same as fetal stem cells. Yeah sure adults have stem cell in there liver or other places, but like from the liver, they can only become a liver cell, sure there are lots of differant types of liver cells, but it can become a stomach cell or something like that. Fetal stem cells can develop into anything.

 

[TwinCrier]

Evidence continues to mount that medical techniques using adult stem cells show greater promise in treating diseases than techniques using stem cells extracted from destroyed human embryos.
In a study on Parkinson's patients, cells from human embryos and fetuses were injected into the brains of Parkinson's patients. 56 percent of the patients developed severe uncontrollable movements, like jerking of their heads and swinging or writhing of their arms. This was in the New England Journal od medicine in 2001.

 

[Ave Maria]

I'm for stem cell research as long as they don't encourage abortion so they can use the aborted fetuses for the research. I think a good source of stem cells for stem cell research would be cord blood that is collected from the umbilical cord after birth.

 

[lucaspa]

I think the problem arises in the fact that abortion farms would possibly pop up and just like there are places where men and women can donate their gametes for money, people would turn their unwanted pregnancy into a profit.

A bit of information here. Embryonic stem cells are taken from 5 day blastocysts. That is, 5 days after conception. Far too early for any woman to know she's pregnant. And no abortion could find the blastocyst; it's way too small. So you don't have to worry about this.

I believe that life begins at conception. The world wants us to believe otherwise, but Scripture does not differentiate between a baby of 2 days post conception versus a baby of 2 months post conception or a baby 2 months after birth.

Where does scripture mention babies pre-birth?

 

[lucaspa]

I'm for stem cell research as long as they don't encourage abortion so they can use the aborted fetuses for the research. I think a good source of stem cells for stem cell research would be cord blood that is collected from the umbilical cord after birth.

Again, a bit of info. Umbilical stem cells are hematopoietic stem cells. That is, they make blood cells. And only blood cells. Not all stem cells are alike. Like I said above, embryonic stem cells come from blastocysts way too small to get by abortion. There is some research into stem cells from fetuses, but with the ability of stem cells to grow in culture, you wouldn't need to have abortions to get enough.

 

[lucaspa]

There are far more stem cells in the umbilical cord of a live birth child then in a tiny, aborted fetus.

I'm not sure of that (and my research is in adult stem cells, so I'm more than passing familiar with the field). Numbers aren't important, since you can always expand the numbers of stem cells in culture. What is critical is the capability of the stem cells -- the tissues that the stem cells can turn into.

Umbilical cord stem cells are hematopoietic stem cells -- they can form blood cells. Now, if you need a marrow transplant later after chemotherapy for cancer, cord blood cells are great. If you have to make more nerves because you have Parkinson's, no luck.

Embryonic stem cells and fetal cells have the capability of making more tissues. So you have the ethical problem of the cells you would like to use aren't as capable of curing disease as the cells you don't want to use.

 

[lucaspa]

Couple of critisisms. 1, I've heard that over 80% of fertilized eggs do not
actually every grow into a fetus, and that most all of
the times, the egg leaves the uterus before the woman
even noticesses she's pregnant. If that's so, then
isn't that alot of persons dying before they reach the
age of accountability? 2, there's alot of
embryoes that are just frozen, the majority of them
will never develop into a fetus. If that's so, then
why not use them for something; or is it that a person
cannot be treated as a resource such as an animal?

The information is basically correct. Altho the number is about 50%. Fully 25% of fertilized ova (egg) never implants in the uterus and comes out in the menstrual blood. The woman never even knows she was pregnant. Of the remaining 75%, about half don't develop properly. Embryonic development is a tricky thing and there's lots that can go wrong. Most of it goes wrong in the first month and the embryo spontaneously aborts. Late periods.

 

[lucaspa]

Virtually every experiment using embryonic cells in humans has gone awry, sometimes with very bad effects.

Not all of them. You can find a list of studies at PubMed.

One trial using embryonic stem cells to treat parkinson's diease went so bad that the people were actually much worse off than the people who had no treatment whatsoever. All of the subjects who got the treatment are now dead, after suffering greatly with the aftereffects of having the stem cells go wild inside their brains. I won't get into the graphic details.

Can you cite the study, please?

Another one in Pittsburgh was supposed to "cure" juvenile diabetes. Everything had worked perfectly in mice and other animals, so they moved on to human trials. everyone of the subjects who received the stem cell treatmenst developed severe deformities in their pancreases. The trail was abandoned after only a few months because the outcomes were so prevalent and so bad.

Again, a citation, please?

Human beings are not disposable, and that's my final answer.

The question has always been: when does human life begin? It appears that your belief is at conception. Others have different beliefs.

 

[lucaspa]

Evidence continues to mount that medical techniques using adult stem cells show greater promise in treating diseases than techniques using stem cells extracted from destroyed human embryos.
In a study on Parkinson's patients, cells from human embryos and fetuses were injected into the brains of Parkinson's patients. 56 percent of the patients developed severe uncontrollable movements, like jerking of their heads and swinging or writhing of their arms. This was in the New England Journal od medicine in 2001.

FYI, the cells used were not embryonic stem cells, but fetal stem cells. Different cells. I haven't found the original article on PubMed yet, but did find a news article in Science about it. Here it is:

"In just 1 week, an experimental treatment for Parkinson's disease--fetal cell transplants--went from promising to perilous. At least, that's how much of the general media reported the publication of mixed results from the first double-blind study. But Parkinson's researchers caution that results from a single trial, especially one that was controversial from the start, should not be the final word on the technique.


On 8 March, neuroscientist Curt Freed of the University of Colorado School of Medicine in Denver, neurologist Stanley Fahn of Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons in New York City, and their colleagues reported in The New England Journal of Medicine that injecting fetal cells into the brains of Parkinson's patients resulted in a significant improvement in some recipients. Several patients, however, also experienced troubling side effects. Parkinson's disease is marked by the mysterious death of brain cells that produce a chemical messenger called dopamine, which helps control motor function. The researchers had hoped to replace the lost cells by injecting dopamine-producing neurons from the brains of aborted fetuses into the affected areas of patients' brains. Several studies of this experimental technique had yielded encouraging results, but none included a control group."

Ah, found it! Here's the Abstract from the NEJM paper. It's not exactly what your source reported to you.

"BACKGROUND: Transplantation of human embryonic dopamine neurons into the brains of patients with Parkinson's disease has proved beneficial in open clinical trials. However, whether this intervention would be more effective than sham surgery in a controlled trial is not known. METHODS: We randomly assigned 40 patients who were 34 to 75 years of age and had severe Parkinson's disease (mean duration, 14 years) to receive a transplant of nerve cells or sham surgery; all were to be followed in a double-blind manner for one year. In the transplant recipients, cultured mesencephalic tissue from four embryos was implanted into the putamen bilaterally. In the patients who received sham surgery, holes were drilled in the skull but the dura was not penetrated. The primary outcome was a subjective global rating of the change in the severity of disease, scored on a scale of -3.0 to 3.0 at one year, with negative scores indicating a worsening of symptoms and positive scores an improvement. RESULTS: The mean (+/-SD) scores on the global rating scale for improvement or deterioration at one year were 0.0+/-2.1 in the transplantation group and -0.4+/-1.7 in the sham-surgery group. Among younger patients (60 years old or younger), standardized tests of Parkinson's disease revealed significant improvement in the transplantation group as compared with the sham-surgery group when patients were tested in the morning before receiving medication (P=0.01 for scores on the Unified Parkinson's Disease Rating Scale; P=0.006 for the Schwab and England score). There was no significant improvement in older patients in the transplantation group. Fiber outgrowth from the transplanted neurons was detected in 17 of the 20 patients in the transplantation group, as indicated by an increase in 18F-fluorodopa uptake on positron-emission tomography or postmortem examination. After improvement in the first year, dystonia and dyskinesias recurred in 15 percent of the patients who received transplants, even after reduction or discontinuation of the dose of levodopa. CONCLUSIONS: Human embryonic dopamine-neuron transplants survive in patients with severe Parkinson's disease and result in some clinical benefit in younger but not in older patients."

 

[Carrye]

I'm not sure where to start here. There are a couple of different conversations going on in this thread: 1) When does life begin and 2) What research should be done with stem cells. Let me first make a bit of a distinction within #2, so I will paste something that I wrote last week.

I have been trained in biology (my undergrad), and now have dabbled a bit in philosophy and theology (my masters), so I am coming at this issue educated in several of its important components. What gets me is a few things:
1) The lack of distinction made between stem cell research, and embryonic stem cell research (ESC). This difference holds huge moral implications, and is even important within science. Grouping the two together as if they were one is misleading, and malicious. The average American is intelligent enough to understand the difference, so let's let them have it.

2) The assumption that ESC have the ability to cure every disease known to man. First of all, that's not even a scientifically valid hypothesis. We thought antibiotics would wipe out all disease too, and we all know that hasn't (and won't) happen. There is no worldly thing that will cure the problems of the human race. I'm not saying that we should stop looking for treatments to help people, but we should do so responsibly while recognizing our limits.

3) Just because we can, doesn't mean we should. This is scientific ethics at its best, and really, human responsibility glorified.

4) ESC come from murdered human babies. There's no way around this. Removing the religious factor entirely still leaves us with the fact that an abortion kills a living human being. We cannot use a product that comes as a result of killing another person. Why not, they're dead anyway? a) We cannot kill a person for his organs, which could be used in transplants. The organs and tissues of one person could help thousands of others, so it would be contributing to the greater good, right? Wrong. b) The precedent that would be set by using embryonic stem cells in this way would create a supply and demand for aborted babies. c) We don't use dead people for our own purposes, we lay them to rest.

5) Some researchers say that using some embryonic stem cells would allow them to culture (grow) unlimited quantities of new stem cells. If this were true, it would have already happened. While there is a federal ban on ESC testing, that only applies to labs who are funded by federal dollars; this does not apply to private foundations.

6) The ends do not justify the means; sorry Machiavelli.

I've been frustrated by the media's deceit, science's irresponsibility, and people's belief that if it could possibly help, then we should do it. But we must not do it.