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 bodys 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 Mingers group at Kings College, London, want to use the cloned embryos to create stem cells carrying the genetic defects responsible for conditions such as spinal muscular dystrophy, Parkinsons and Alzheimers.
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.
hehehe....judging from the results in the picture in post #4, I agree with you.
Indeed, to be useful, I would think they should express things in terms of "Of the genetic material in the new cells, xx% is uniquely human, yy% is uniquely lapine, zz% is common to both rabids and humans, and ww% appears to be random filler.
We already do have a moral (and very successful) solution, namely adult and cord blood stem cells.
No thanks. Have enough problems with the current genetic pool.
IMO, if the scientists are asking for "permission," it means that the research is already underway.
Looked at DU and stumbled on their thread about this (I went over to see their response to OBL's possible capture).
No one had anything good to say about this (they made jokes about politicians, they smiled because it would make "fundies" heads explode, and then some questioned it vaguely while some shouted them down for challenging things their puny minds could not understand).
Then there was this curious comment; "Let's stick with stem cells and not this other garbage. - But hopefully it'll stay out of U.S. media until Wednesday."
Anything to win an election, damn the issues to obscurity, eh?
I guess this is the end result of acceptance of the theory of evolution. When people get away from the belief that man was created in the image of God and is just another animal that evolved from another animal, anything can be justified.
Scriptural references in Genesis suggest that it was the corruption of the human race by angelic beings that was a factor in God judging the earth and destroying it in the Flood. If mankind is now in the process of corrupting the human race for the second time, they'd best be aware of the danger they're bringing on themselves.
Dear God.
.
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