Harvard Scientists to Clone Human Embryos 592
An anonymous reader writes "Harvard University scientists claim they will soon start trying to clone human embryos to create stem cells. Even with the history of controversy and fraud researchers hope they can one day use the newly created stem cells to aid in battle against many diseases. From the article: 'The privately funded work is aimed at devising treatments for such ailments as diabetes, Lou Gehrig's disease, sickle-cell anemia and leukemia. Harvard is only the second American university to announce its venture into the challenging, politically charged research field.'"
Re:Even without bringing morality into the questio (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Survival of the Fittest (Score:1, Interesting)
Will we evolve to have genetic adaptations for urban environments? Perhaps not, since we do not just let everyone who is weak die from their allergies and what not. But we may yet engineer some, or just do it the old fashioned way: devising behavioral and technological methods to mitigate the environmental issues. We evolved big brains to allow adaptation within an individual's life, and our society allows the propogation of these adaptations without any genetic encoding. Perhaps the only evolutionary genetic pressure is to have minds capable of being in society and bearing its memes.
Re:Morality? (Score:3, Interesting)
Most people seem to consider that all human life is equally valuable, no matter their station in life. You know, the whole "all men are created equal" thing. The real question is whether or not embryonic humans are really humans. If they are, then this sort of organ farming is morally reprehensible. If they are not, then no harm done. Both sides are blathering on about "usurping God's authority" or "superstition hindering science", but really it comes down to that single question: Are embryoes human. And nobody has found a really satisfactory answer to that - they just say "yes they are" or "no they're not", whichever supports their view.
Re:Morality? (Score:5, Interesting)
My father was supposed to die many years ago. The doctors permormed miracles and brought him back from the edge of death. But he is not the man he used to be. He suffers from many disabilities as a result of his illness and the operation used to save him. He is continually miserable too. He is my father, when he finally dies I am going to be profoundly sad and it's going to change my life but I still think he should have died back then. I don't believe in god and I don't think he is going to heaven or hell. I just think it was a mistake to force him to live when his body had given out, just to resurrect him as a crippled and sad old man. I hate seeing him this way and I have made sure I have a living will so that I will never be in his position either.
Re:Survival of the Fittest (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Baby killers [Re: br. morality in...] (Score:4, Interesting)
KFG
Re:Even without bringing morality into the questio (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Even without bringing morality into the questio (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Baby killers [Re: br. morality in...] (Score:3, Interesting)
If the definition of murder were that simple, then our President would already have been convicted for the murders of (pick your number, I'll settle for a round number near the middle) 100,000 Iraqis. No, murder is not a simple or natural definition. We as individuals and a society get to define murder. The majority of American individuals believe that abortion should be legal, and is not murder. Our courts have agreed. Our society is divided, but if the 'decision' of society comes from the majority of its members, then our society has decided that abortion and the disposal of unwanted embryos from IVF are not murder.
Re:Morality? (Score:5, Interesting)
What you've done is base your reasoning on an emotional plea rather than a logical framework. It is a tragedy when someone so firmly entrenched in the human community passes from us---of that there can be no debate, and that depth of tragedy does not exist in cases of abortion, IVF, and other examples of the destruction of human embryos. We will all miss the guy with the family more than the embryo we never knew.
But that was never the claim of those with a religious objection to the act. Religious and moral objections center around the question of the Rights of Man and at what stage in life those rights are accorded to us (Embryonic? Fetal? Infant? Puberty? Adulthood? etc...). The religious arguement is that those rights are accorded to each individual as soon as that individual comes into being. In short, "God bless everyone...no exceptions". Others argue that those rights are prematurely granted and shouldn't be accorded until birth. The law takes a graduated approach, saying that rights are accorded piecemeal as we move through the stages of life, and the most basic of rights (the Right to Life) is granted (conditionally) sometime around the third trimester of pregnancy.
Nowhere in the discussion do the religious folk claim that the people who would be saved don't deserve to be saved, just that the price is too high.
That argument in an (WAY) oversimplified nutshell: You and four others are in a hot air balloon and the balloon begiuns to sink into a volcano (too much weight!). Some quick calulations reveal that if just one of you jumped overboard the rest would survive. Do you toss someone overboard? If so, how do you determine who? Destruction of the embryo to save other lives is akin, in this argument, to saying that you determine the person to toss overboard by evaluating their life and determining which one has the fewest friends and family who will miss them, or alternatively by which is least capable of fending off the forced toss.
There are, of course, arguements on boths sides and such implausible scenarios can always be gamed in logical debates like this, so don't carry it too far. I'm not trying to get into a tit-for-tat over the specifics of the fantasy example, but rather just trying to show you the gist of the argument.
Many people would vehemently disagree with you. There are quite few "clear cut" moral decisions in life. If there were, we wouldn't need to argue so much about them.
Disclaimer: I am against the destruction of embryos in this context for religious and moral reasons. I am not approaching this from an unbiased perspective (like anyone does!). Your mileage may vary. Do not stare at happy fun ball, etc....
Tom Caudron
http://tom.digitalelite.com/ [digitalelite.com]
Re:Survival of the Fittest (Score:3, Interesting)
I agree for the most part of your analysis. The way I see it, there are only three possibilites:
We *will* all die at some point.
We will *all* die at some point.
We will all *die* at some point.
That is why the accent should be not on saving presentnly living on any cost, but on creating well ballanced (taking into account statsistical survivability...) number of new. The death, except incidental but I am talking about age related death is not obligatory for any living specie but it is obviously a result of evolution, it serves an important purpose: to toughen the specie, to try to solve any change in environment thru USE of evolution. If you live long and breed late, you (antropomorphysm of a specie) are wasting time, you are not evolving enaugh. Most survival-capable species are those that are short-lived with high reproductive rates, such as microroganisms, insects and rodents (or in general: The Pests).
Now, we clearly took different path, employing reasoning problem-solving to survival instead using good old raw power of evolution. About now we are starting to feel a little discomfort because perhaps there is no turning back: Should something (i.e, a large asteroid) shatter our complicated survival system, we may fall down beyond recovery and wanish.
OTOH, keeping all "the weak" as we do, provides us a lot of genetic diversity, which is A Good Thing for later when we get into trouble, eventually. Why let them die now, if some time later, some of their traits may have beneficial side effects? Anticipating what will and what won't be good somehow beats the point of evolution. If you personaly feel uncomfortable about "bad genes" polluting your trait, choose very carefully who you have children with. Find a mate of opposite sex who shares your attitude and you both scan your genomes for hidden problems. Don't press your preferences on everybody else. Besides, exploring deseases and gaining more knowledge can only strengthen us. The emotional drive to help and save our loved ones fuels the explorations in biology that will give us benefits reaching broader then medicine.
I have a hunch that this embrio cloning and stem cell research is just a temporary phase (like 19-century grave-robbing for anatomical research was) which will lead to deeper insight and capability to manipulate any cell and tissue type transformation and self-healing, organs regeneration, etc. Some of today's canibalistic (in technical sense of that word) treatments (transfusion, transplantation, stem-cell treatments) will be historical as much as blood-letting is today.
Re:Dodgy consequences (Score:3, Interesting)
I won't dispute the extreme example, because I understand the point you are trying to make. My response is probably equally extreme. If the "host" was forced into a situation of accepting a parasitic backpack brought about by no action of their own, then I would say cut them free. However, partaking in sexual activity protected or otherwise you must assume responsibility for the reprocussions. It's something you learn in sex ed, hell, it's something you learn early in life. It's something every person faces every day. Speed, you may get pulled over and ticketed. Buy drugs, you face the possibility of being burned in a sting. Don't show up to work, you face the possibility of being fired.
My point is that the people making the argument have no bearing on the issue. The question is a reasonable one, and rather than trying to answer the question we spend more time trying to villify and mock those asking it.
Re:Is it worth it? (Score:3, Interesting)
So you think that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were all about saving innocent Japanese and US military lives? Maybe you should do a little research into it. There was no one reason for using the bomb. Yes, they wanted to avoid a costly (in lives and money) D-day style invasion on the Japanese home islands. They also wanted to show off their new weapon to the Russians. They also wanted to know what effect these new weapons would have on a populated city. This is why they chose Hiroshima, it was never bombed before, so they wouldn't confuse the damage from the atamic bomb with damage from previous bombings. Why was it never bombed before? Absolutely no military presence, all civilians. Humanitarian mission indeed.
There were other options, like blockading Japan, which would have avoided using atomic bombs and avoided casualties from an invasion. The fear was that Russia might invade after a while in that scenario. Another plan involved detonating an atomic bomb high over Tokyo harbour to demonstrate the power of the atomic bomb. But they only had two bombs at that point and it would be several months to build more if that didn't work. Also, if it did work, they wouldn't have been able to study the effects of a nuke on a city. And it wouldn't have sent as strong a message to Moscow. And scaring communists is a great humanitarian cause, right?
Also, Nagasaki is even more questionable. The Japanese were willing to surrender after Hiroshima, but they wanted to be able to keep their Emperor. The US demanded unconditional surrender, so they bombed Nagasaki. The Japanese surrendered unconditionally, after which the US allowed them to keep their Emperor anyway. Yes there is value to giving something because you are magnamonious in victory as opposed to making a concession in a peace treaty. But is a point of honour worth 100,000 civilian casualties?
Anyways, the use of atomic weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki is morally ambiguous at best. At worst it was a war crime. I guess it all depends on your perspective.
Thank God (if you like) for "superstition" (Score:3, Interesting)
Yes, if only scientists could be free to walk under ladders and break mirrors, their experiments would be much easier to carry out.
Oh, wait, by "silly superstitions," you meant ideas like "life is sacred because God created it." Ideas accepted and elaborated by great minds throughout the centuries, which you so easily dismiss.
Even without considering whether those "superstitions" are based on truth, I think it's clear that a world where straight logic ruled would be unpleasant. Logic might suggest you should experiment on the homeless for the good of "productive" members of society. Logic might say you should kill those with genetic diseases to clean the gene pool. And that's assuming that you even WANT to work for the good of society - a rather vague, moral idea in itself.
I can't prove the sanctity of life in a lab, but I'd hate to live in a world where that "superstition" was thrown out the window. Progress indeed. But toward what?
Re:One person's view... (Score:3, Interesting)
So when, in your opinion, does life begin? It's pretty obvious that birth is a poor milestone, since there's no real difference between a baby one minute before it's born and one minute afterwards. Viability's not good either, as it moves backward with medical progress: an unviable foetus thirty years ago may be perfectly viable now. What about the presence of certain major organs, such as the heart or brain? Well, there's no magical instant when they suddenly appear--rather, they slowly develop over time. Indeed, there's only one magical instant in the entire process: conception, before which their are two different things and after which there is a new organism. From that moment on, the process is not essentially different from that whereby an infant becomes a man: gradual and slight changes.
Note that I'm arguing purely from the scientific side. There's actually a religious argument that life begins sometime after conception (basically, we know that souls cannot split; we know that early-stage embryos can; thus an early stage embryo must not have a soul), but I'm trying to avoid the religious angle.
Although of course the root of the argument is religious, or moral, or ethical, for it hinges on murder: does it matter if we kill a human being? If you don't think it does then it also doesn't matter if the embryo is human or not. But to be honest, I don't see the point of arguing with someone who thinks murder is okay by him.
Re:Dodgy consequences (Score:3, Interesting)
It is certainly unfair that a broken condom or that
The cost? Medical bills, possibly some derision for the adoption or the pregnancy(you can't please some folks), and a body that isn't going to spring back like it once would. No small cost, and perhaps harder than an abortion. I say perhaps because of the four women who've told me that they've had abortions, all four would near tears when they speak of it. Two that I still keep in contact with mourn the loss(one of which was a rape), yet when pressed would admit they'd probably do it again.
As far as legal precedents - laws conflict. Roe Vs Wade may support the pro-choice crowd, but if a pregnant woman is murdered it's considered a double homocide. Using the legal system as a basis for argument then would suggest that an unborn child is only a life if it's wanted. Would it be considered a double homocide then, if a woman was shot in line at an abortion clinic? Such thoughts feel atrociously callous.
I hope that we as a people can strive to a compromise with this issue, though it may be a paradox that can never be solved.