Posted on 11/06/2006 4:27:12 PM PST by Pokey78
Scientists have applied for permission to create part-human, part-animal embryos as part of research to create new treatments for debilitating neurological diseases.
Two teams of researchers today submitted applications to the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority for licences to be allowed to use therapeutic cloning to fuse human cells with rabbit, cow and goat egg.
They want to create early-stage “chimeric” embryos that would be 99.9 per cent human and 0.1 per cent animal in order to produce stem cells – the body’s basic building blocks that can form different all other types of cells. The embryos would be destroyed after 14 days.
The licences would allow the scientists to remove the nuclei from animal eggs and replace them with human cells. Until now therapeutic cloning has been carried out using human eggs from consenting IVF patients but these are in short supply.
Dr Stephen Minger’s group at King’s College, London, want to use the cloned embryos to create stem cells carrying the genetic defects responsible for conditions such as spinal muscular dystrophy, Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s.
Once the stems cells have been differentiated into neurons, it will help them investigate what causes the diseases and help in the development of new drugs and other therapies.
Dr Minger said: “We are concerned that the current state of the technology means that hundreds of eggs from young women will be required to generate a single human embryonic stem cell line.
“Therefore we consider it more appropriate to use non-human eggs from livestock as a surrogate to generate these disease-specific cell lines until the efficiency of this procedure is improved.”
Dr Lyle Armstrong and colleagues at the North East England Stem Cell Institute in Newcastle, is seeking to insert human skin cells into animal eggs to study how eggs can re-programme adult tissues into more primitive cells.
The answers could ultimately allow scientists to take skin cells from patients and convert them into other forms of tissue such as kidney cells that could be transplanted with the risk of it being rejected by the immune system.
A decision on whether to grant the licences is expected from the HFEA in around three months.
Josephine Quintavalle, director of Comment on Reproductive Ethics, said: “This is abhorrent. It sounds like the craziest kind of science imaginable.”
Wait a minute. We "evolved" right? Just suck the cells from a worm or an ape and you should be in good shape. Right?
Get used to it. When you devalue life and open this Pandora's Box, this is the future.
This weird medical sh-t always seems to come out of the UK.
Sounds like something out of "the island of Dr. Moreau"
Huh?
#4. I see what you're saying. ...."It's been done before!"
hehehe
I think I'm gonna be sick.
Dr Mourau??
"They want to create early-stage “chimeric” embryos that would be 99.9 per cent human and 0.1 per cent animal..."
That's a rather misleading statement, and I'm not sure whether or not the Telegraph authors realize it.
About 97% of a human being's DNA content is total rubbish - it's not maintained by error-correcting enzymes, it's not transcoded into messenger RNA, it's not compiled into proteins. It just sort of sits there taking up space. Sure, in some cases the simple act of taking up space might be biochemically useful, but by and large it's just genetic residue.
Of the 3% that actually encodes real, useful, active genes, between 90% to 95% of that material is common among all mammals. It encodes stuff like organ structure, hormones, even super-fundamental stuff like cellular respiration.
The remaining differences are largely tuning parameters - i.e. just how wide to grow the rib cage, at what angle to connect the skull to the spine, exactly how far up the ulna to attach the bicep, and so on. The existence of these tuning parameters is common to almost all mammalian species; the only real variant is the exact settings to which these parameters are set (and variations of these settings exist within a species).
Very, very little DNA actually codes for traits that are distinctly unique to any given species. For humans, for example, the brain structures known as the Werneke's and Broca's areas have no known corrolary anywhere in the animal kingdom. For rabbits, the reflective retinal layer called the tapetum lucidum, while not unique to rabbits, represents an organ that human DNA presumably does not have the code for.
It is differences such as these that constitute the 0.1% that the article describes. However, it fails to mention that, of the 99.9% of the DNA that is "human", about 97% of it is junk while the remaining 3% is actually common to both the human and the animal in question.
I don't think kidney cells function very well outside of a kidney - very complicated organ. So could they build a scaffolding and grow a kidney around it? Or would they just pop one of these little chimera embryos (or other officially de-humanized) embryo into a cow/woman/artificial womb for eight and a half months and let the fetus take care of growing the kidneys for them?
Mrs VS
THIS ARTICLE LEAVES OUT A VERY CRITICAL RATIONALIZATION FOR ARMSTRONG'S WORK. In 2005, Wu Suk Hwang, from Seoul South Korea was found to have fabricated this EXACT experiment. Hwang's work was accepted without skepticism by a number of researchers who did not know better, which resulted in millions of dollars of research money (from the NIH and private sources) spent to elaborate his findings-- which were not fruitful because he fabricated his data.
So, Armstrong's work is a FINAL, CONCLUSIVE repetition of these experiments to determine IF scientific validity EXISTS to support Hwang's premise. Also, the experiment consists not of creating embryos, but of creating a pluripotent (stem) cell from a differentiated(has already become a specific type of cell in the body) somatic cell (skin) which can then be induced to form other cells in the body (such as brain, neuron bodies, organ cells) for therapy.
The scientific community needs to know if this premise (that a somatic, differentiated cell can indeed be reversed to become a stem cell) is actually correct. Should it be proven correct through appropriate experiments, scientists could spare the entire use of embryonic stem cells and defer to using somatic cells-- a moral solution to a stem cell problem.
By the way, I worked along with the leaders in US Stem cell research, who knew Hwang's work was fradulent as soon as they saw it because this premise would be so revolutionary as to change the way we understand stem cell physiology entirely.
God is watching and He's got his hand on the flush handle of the world.
Why is bestiality wrong when it is for sexual desires but okay when it is for scientific inquiry?
Obviously if it is okay to kill and harvest from these human offspring it is because they are "sub-human".
The Constitution will need to be amendend to protect all life.
And here I thought we already had that Hillary Clinton
Is his name Dr. Minger or Dr. Mengele?
yitbos
It's already been done. See Teddy Kennedy.
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It's been done, and it was a failure. Why risk it again?
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