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San Francisco, 10:20 AM
Tue Nov 10
28 posts in the last 24 hours
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Um, this won't cure cancer.
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At the moment there is no way to convert adult stem cells into cardiovascular or neural tissue... epithelial cells are easy, which is why this worked, but any progress against degenerative disease or cardiovascular tissue would be much more difficult
11/19/08
Well, they're already working on neural tissue. Also, with advances in induced pluripotence, any tissue type that can be derived from ESCs will be able to be derived from ASCs.
11/19/08
The point is that NO scientific endeavour should be limited on purely religious grounds. There is no reason to limit embryonic stem cell research except the ridiculous notion that embryos somehow have a 'soul'.
Really, come out of the middle-ages already.
11/19/08
That would be an excellent argument if the only people who had issues with ESC research were people of faith. Unfortunately, that's not the case.
Scientific endeavors should be limited based on ethics. The ethical question here is when does human life begin? When does a human being become a human being? I say at the moment of conception.
Also, is the entire notion of a soul in any human being ridiculous or just in an embryo? If just in an embryo, then when does the soul enter the body? If in general, why should experimentation on any human being be problematic? What defines the worth of a person if not the soul?
I know it's simpler to use religion as a wedge issue, but like most everything else, the issue is deeper than that.
11/19/08
To me, someone's 'soul' (I don't believe in a soul. I'm a materialist, of sorts) appears when they become conscious, so to speak(of course, when does actual 'consciousness' as a full human being appear? Human children under the age of five aren't able to put themselves into others shoes, because their brains haven't developed that machinery yet). That would most likely be a few months before the baby is born, or at least weeks (I forget the pre-natal development timeline). So, while technically human life does begin at conception, as in that's when the DNA first comes together as one into a single cell, I find giving full human worth (TM) to a cell, or a batch of cells, or anything less than a fully formed baby (barring developmental disorders, of course) to be folly. Human? Yes, it shares the DNA, it will BE human someday, but I don't consider it Human.
Also, as far as 'people of faith', I would say you are a person of faith: You have faith that there is a soul (of course I'm assuming you use soul to mean some type of spirit that inhabits the body and gives it animation and character).
11/19/08
I'm sorry you feel that way. ;-D
To make an ethical or legal judgment, we must be able to identify when a human (or potential human) begins to be afforded rights. A few months or weeks before birth is meaningless since some babies are born premature or late and therefore the milestone of personhood can only be realized after the fact. If you turn this around and measure gestational development, does that mean preemies don't have any right to medical care because they haven't reached the proper stage of development and are therefore not human? I don't think anyone disagrees that there needs to be a line drawn somewhere, just where that line should be drawn.
I don't take offense to anything you've said (although I'm unsure why you feel sorry for me) and thank you for keeping things civil. That is a rare find in politically/emotionally charged subjects on internet forums.
11/19/08
If we can build a scaffold that prompts stem cells to differentiate between muscle, bone and connective tissue in that continuous way as they grow and migrate along the scaffold, that will be a huge step forward.
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Except that the process will become patented and protected. Enormous costs to the patients.
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