Back to the Stem Cells

[Avery]

Are you an MD now?
Are these policies stopping YOU from developing this research?

I'm a research scientist for a major pharmacutical company and can point at people who would be dead right now were it not for projects I had a hand in.   

Got a self righteous spin for that one?

[Avery]

"The bill contains a number of safeguards aimed at ensuring that it would apply only to embryos that would otherwise have been discarded.

In fact, UNDIFFERENTIATED stem cells are only around for a few divisions.

[Dartful Dodger]

I'm a research scientist for a major pharmacutical company and can point at people who would be dead right now were it not for projects I had a hand in.

[shmokes]

Yikes!

...Dartful's pulling out the typo attack.  How will Avery possibly recover from that one?

[Avery]

Wow, you're right shmokes, I'm way back in the corner now.  Any move I make from here and he'll slam me with something like, "Goering was a ham fisted typist too, you know".  That'd be a double Gershwin spell check on a double word score.

[shmokes]

I don't buy this business about people seriously considering these things to be a human life that we must protect at all costs from destruction.  It doesn't follow.  For one thing, if people really considered these things humans who cannot protect themselves, why do we allow them to sit around in freezers.  Why don't we set up a public insurance program, or make medicaid apply to them.  They, afterall, have no parents.

And even if they are humans, we certainly don't have qualms about sending humans to war for the greater good of society.  We know for a fact that some, tens of thousands even, will die.  These are humans who are self aware and have families and careers and aspirations.  We even believe in drafting these people and forcing them to go to their deaths for the good of the country as a whole.  How can you say that it is okay to send a soldier to his death, but that an embryo must be protected at all costs? 

Is cancer not as great a threat as Vietnam or Iraq?

[Grasshopper]

I always think it's a bit odd that pro-life supporters insist that a bunch of cells in a test tube with no central nervous system is definitely of equivalent worth to a fully formed human being, and yet many of them are quite happy to eat meat.

Based on the available evidence, I believe it is far more likely that a complex mammal such as a pig (which is actually fairly genetically close to a human) is conscious and aware of its own existence than a bunch of cells in a test tube. For a start the pig has a central nervous system, and acts in a manner that suggests at least rudimentary intelligence.

I'm not actually a vegetarian myself but if you're going to apply an extreme precautionary principle to protecting all (possibly) conscious life, then there does seem to be an inconsistency between some people's attitudes towards animals and the stem cell/abortion issue.

[Dartful Dodger]

I always think it's a bit odd that pro-life supporters insist that a bunch of cells in a test tube with no central nervous system is definitely of equivalent worth to a fully formed human being, and yet many of them are quite happy to eat meat.

I always think it's a bit odd that vegetarians, who are pro-death, insist that a human egg isn't a life.  These people will eat cheese and other animal byproducts, yet many of them are against eating eggs.

There does seem to be an inconsistency between some people's attitudes towards the animals' unborn and humans'.

[mr.Curmudgeon]

There does seem to be an inconsistency between some people's attitudes towards the animals' unborn and humans'.

Here's a solution: How about we outlaw abortions, but then feed all the unwanted babies to fertile wild animals (infants are rich in protein!), then harvest the animals stem cells and use them in human experimentation in order to create disease-free mutant hybrid ani-people?

Right-to-lifer's get their births, the Peta people get happy, well-fed animals, and the progressive scientific community gets humans imbued with super-human animal skills! Everybody's happy!


mrC

[Crazy Cooter]

"The bill contains a number of safeguards aimed at ensuring that it would apply only to embryos that would otherwise have been discarded.

In fact, UNDIFFERENTIATED stem cells are only around for a few divisions.  Shortly thereafter inside and outside are defined.  An embryo prepared the normal way will NEVER yield undifferentiated stem cells.  You couldn't find it in time.

So fertility clinic freezer babies won't work?  They'd be too far developed?

[Avery]

I don't think they allow more than a few divisions before they freeze them.  I don't know when, but at some point your going to run into the same problems that keep NASA from freezing people to send them to Mars.