Stem Cell Research

[kerrin]

Another topic for which 'the right' typical doesn't use reason and 'the left' wants for us all to foot the bill. Although, I must applaud former President Bush, who managed to escape criticism from the "religious right" even though his policies did not support their cause—he threw them a bone with no federal funding and masked it in opposition to all stem cell research, which most still seem to believe he was.

In anticipation of the forthcoming "outrage" from the "religious right" I thought I'd start a thread about the topic with a couple of questions:

To 'the right': What makes a stem cell more precious then the skin cell that died and fell off this morning in the shower?

To 'the left': Why should my taxes pay for this research? If there is a market for products and procedures for stem cell research why isn't private industry enough?

[m42]

And to the neither right nor left? ;)

[kerrin]

And to the neither right nor left? ;)
I love you all, but I will offer this:

To neither 'right' nor 'left': Is private industry doing all it can to capitalize on stem cell research? Despite the waste of tax money that the FDA is are you glad to see the approval of stem cell research testing (http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/01/090126160206.htm)?

[m42]

I love you all, but I will offer this:

To neither 'right' nor 'left': Is private industry doing all it can to capitalize on stem cell research? Despite the waste of tax money that the FDA is are you glad to see the approval of stem cell research testing (http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/01/090126160206.htm)?

Awww! We love you too, snookums. ;)

The beauty of the private sector in a free market system is, if anyone feels the current players are falling short of expectations, they have no excuse to bitch about it. If you think you can do better, by all means, do try.

Worst case scenario, you've motivated the competition. ;)

The government has no business funding these trials. Regulation is one thing, but this should not be taxpayer funded.

[kerrin]

The beauty of the private sector in a free market system is, if anyone feels the current players are falling short of expectations, they have no excuse to bitch about it.
True. I wonder at times if the private sector doesn't resort to much to Lobbyist begging for handouts.

The government has no business funding these trials. Regulation is one thing, but this should not be taxpayer funded.
No doubt. I wish we had some "Liberals" (socialist) to smack down on this forum. ;)

[m42]

No doubt. I wish we had some "Liberals" (socialist) to smack down on this forum. ;)

I'd play liberal, but I've already attempted a liberal stance. We both know how poorly that turned out. ;)

[John A Roark]

GAWD WILL DAMN YOU TO ETERNAL, EVERLASTING HELL FOR YOUR VILE SINS!
(Oops--did I say that out loud?)
Stem cells means abortions, don't you know that? Gosh, you uneducated commies!

Seriously, all the anti-stem cell rhetoric I've heard is based primarily on religious objections that 'abortion factories' will swing into full production once the demand for stem cells on which research can be performed gets to critical mass.

How does that process in any logical chain, except in the mind of a paranoid?

Leftist arguments for funding are the same as they have always been--'we think it's a good idea, so we want to gorge our snouts at the public trough, and if you don't like paying taxes to support us, we'll seize everything you own and enslave you. Or kill you.'

[kerrin]

I'd play liberal, but I've already attempted a liberal stance. We both know how poorly that turned out. ;)
I found it entertaining. :)

[m42]

I found it entertaining. :)

You would. *chortle*

I can occasionally laugh at my own intolerances (dairy, alcohol, cocaine, avian flu, stinky farm animals, etc). ;)

I rarely laugh at other people's stupidity.

Liberalism isn't a stance, it's a state of mind. I must confess, it scares the hell out of me that I cannot understand it.


* Yes. I was kidding about the dairy. ;)

[kerrin]

I rarely laugh at other people's stupidity.
Being entertained does not always involve laughter. I enjoy interesting dialog: that entertains me.

Liberalism isn't a stance, it's a state of mind. I must confess, it scares the hell out of me that I cannot understand it.
A state of mind, indeed. To understand it fully I think is very hard. Although, I think understanding Rousseau helps in understanding modern Liberalism.

* Yes. I was kidding about the dairy. ;)
Glad to hear it, I was beginning to worry. Although, since we are confessing things, I must confess I have a few notebooks from my teenage years full of poetry that read much like dairies.

[John Scott]

Extraction of such cells using current technology requires the destruction of the human embryo.




Do it without taking human life and I would have no problem with it.

[kerrin]

Do it without taking human life and I would have no problem with it.
Interesting, your position intrigues me. I want to understand it better.
How is the somewhat "random combination of several chemicals (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Composition_of_the_human_body)" assembled in a petri dish that is subsequently disassembed "taking a human life"?

What would you do with the embryo from a "tubular pregnancy"? (the case where it must be removed or the mother and embryo would die)

[m42]

Babies don't need to die.

They can use umbilical cord or adult stem cells.

Didn't they also find a way to grow stem cells from a small sampling of amniotic fluid? The leftover fluid from an amniocentesis could be used.

[John Scott]

What would you do with the embryo from a "tubular pregnancy"? (the case where it must be removed or the mother and embryo would die)

Let me ask you a question. If you are sleeping in your room, 5th floor of a hotel, and wake up to find yourself surrounded by flames so hot your eyebrow has caught fire. With you is a child. In order to save the child from the flames, you toss the child out the window. The kid dies. Is that murder?

Not really. Murder being the intentional taking of human life, you simply took action to prevent a death, that had the foreseeable but not absolute result of death.

If you could have saved the child, you would have.

The primary function of abortion is to end a life which the mother is not willing to take responsibility for. Some argue that abortion is simply the removal of the child from the womb, and the resulting death is merely a byproduct of that removal. But that isn't true. We know that live children have been removed alive, and left to die. The purpose of an abortion is to kill the child.

How is the somewhat "random combination of several chemicals" assembled in a petri dish that is subsequently disassembed "taking a human life"?



They were assembled to become human life. If the IVF didn't take, and no live human resulted, I'd say knock yourself out. But when you create a human life, you have a responsibility to refrain from killing it.

When do you say human life begins?

[kerrin]

When do you say human life begins?

I agree with the experts: human life begins at conception (union of sperm and ovum). I'm just not sure this life possesses rights at the stage where it represents an assembly of chemicals. It seems at that stage, to me, like life without the capacity to express freedom (or 'liberty'). I tend to draw the line at the point the human being possesses the presumed capacity to learn reason, with which it can eventually express it's individual freedom. Medically, it appears this happens before the second trimester: the development of the cerebral cortex. Giving one enough time to remove unwanted pregnancies (rape, incest, the result of one's sexual liberty, etc.).

[John Scott]

I tend to draw the line at the point the human being possesses the presumed capacity to learn reason

Dangerous, in my opinion, to assign different values to human life. Black, White, Asian, Indian, handicapped, diseased, gay, straight, American, German, Jewish, Japanese - it is not for me to say that one life has more value than another.

According to some people (http://www.individualism.com/twenty-eight-days/), value of life should be determined by its value to society. Why? Do you value your life along those lines? It should be up to the individual to decide the value of his or her own life. It's not my choice. I have no right to determine the value of another person's life, and we the only taking of innocent human life should occur with the consent of the person who has a right to end that life - his or her self.

[kerrin]

...it is not for me to say that one life has more value than another.
Indeed. I, personally, do not desire to attribute value to a particular life, which is then written into law. All life is worthy of respect. My only criteria in regard to human life possessing rights is: a presumed capacity to exercise freedom ('liberty') through reason. Animals do not ever possesses this as humans do. In regards to animals: you, me, and RP agree here ;).

What is the problem or danger with the criteria for human life to have a presumed capacity to exercise freedom ('liberty') through reason before it possesses rights?

Do you value your life along those lines?
No. I do not adhere to that standard of a life's value.

I have no right to determine the value of another person's life, and we the only taking of innocent human life should occur with the consent of the person who has a right to end that life - his or her self.
I do not presume to attribute value to another's life. I seek to respect all life—all life has value, but not all life possesses rights (IMO). I'm still unconvinced that an embryo possesses "his or her self" and therefore it seems to lack rights.

Without possession of one's freedom, or at least the presumed capacity to exercise freedom, how can one have a right to life or liberty?

[eternaltraveler]

To neither 'right' nor 'left': Is private industry doing all it can to capitalize on stem cell research? Despite the waste of tax money that the FDA is are you glad to see the approval of stem cell research testing?

This is no simple issue at hand. The problem with scientific research in this country is that just about every institution recieves some kind of federal grants. For profit, not for profit, universities, you name it. So when there is a sweeping ban on the use of federal tax dollars for stem cell research it really does throw a wrench in the all of the existing machinery, because all of it is at least partially funded by the feds. That means if 1 federal dollar went to building an NMR machine or a science building from some federal grant for studying the mean airspeed velocity of a fully laden swallow, you couldn't do stem cell research there.

In order to do legal stem cell research one would have to build an entire separate facility essentially only for stem cell research at enormous cost when all the rest of your science can share resources. This really slowed things down a lot in the private and public sectors.

Of course the fundemental problem was that federal government put itself in this position to begin with where the seemingly somewhat innoculous act of withholding public funding can so cripple an industry and innovation.

[eternaltraveler]

They were assembled to become human life. If the IVF didn't take, and no live human resulted, I'd say knock yourself out. But when you create a human life, you have a responsibility to refrain from killing it.

I'd say we have the responsibility to refrain from killing people. "Human life" can mean anything from a Nobel laureate to a cancer cell (some of which have become free living (see hela cellshttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HeLa)

When do you say human life begins?

Human life began in some gradual way some hundreds of thousands to millions of years ago. Both a sperm and egg are alive and human. They are however, not people. People have brains and can think.

Just the same way as human life began in a semi nebulous way over the course of epochs (or aeons if you trace it back all the way), so too does the development of personhood in the concepsus. As we know personhood is a function of the brain, so it therefore follows that before there is even the slightest trace of a brain there is no person. After a brain starts to develop the waters muddy a bit; there is no hard and fast point where you can say before here there is no person, and after here, there is. Our society has very little problem with killing entities with little neural complexity, so surely the embryo should have at least as much neural complexity as a mouse before we start to entertain notions of it's innate rights. Neural development is a process, one that does not result in a self aware reasoning being until sometime after birth.

With present and near future technology we can come pretty close to making just about any random somatic cell develop into a person. This dubious potential doesn't mean any of these cells somehow have "rights".

In medicine we have criteria for establishing brain death. Once these criteria are met a person is no longer considered "alive" and we can harvest organs from them resulting in the death of most of the rest of the carcass left behind (aside from the organs transplanted into other people).

As a fun tidbit, about 60% of conceptions do not result birth. (Spontaneous) abortion is the rule, not the exception. [PMID]7117572 *

61.9% of conceptuses will be lost prior to 12 weeks. Most of these losses (91.7%) occur subclinically, without the knowledge of the mother.

A blastocyst has no brain or even a single nerve cell. Assigning the same level of rights to this as you do to a person and calling it a child is preposterous and has no basis outside of religion. If you want something reasonable on which to base your ethical framework I suggest simply swapping out "human life" for "person".

The practice of confusing the two has and is resulting in the death and suffering of people.

[kerrin]

eternaltravler,

Thanks for providing so much useful information.

With present and near future technology we can come pretty close to making just about any random somatic cell develop into a person.

I recently read that somatic cells if implanted in a womb could develop into embryos:
http://www.thehastingscenter.org/Bioethicsforum/Post.aspx?id=724

They are saying, if I understand correctly, that the data in this study falsifies the notion that an adult stem cell could never become an embryo, right? And this is because human ES cells developed far enough along to produce proteins only found in a placenta (they became totipotent)? This is where the notion that ES and iPS cells, given the right conditions, could produce the same life that an embryo can, right?

[eternaltraveler]

This is where the notion that ES and iPS cells, given the right conditions, could produce the same life that an embryo can, right?

of course. The data that makes up the blueprint for a person is written on the DNA. There is no difference in the DNA between the first cell that developed into you and your current skin cells (aside from some small amount of genetic drift perhaps). With iPS cells they've proven that the epigenetic changes distinguishing cell lines can be reversed (which intuitively makes sense anyway).

Of course the DNA on any random somatic cell might be damaged in some way that destroys some bit of data needed to fully build a person while still retaining that which it needs to fulfill it's own far more limited function. The only genetic changes that one would notice from a random somatic mutation would be ones that resulted in a malignancy. We don't live long enough for random genetic changes that even result in disfunctional cells to result in pathology on the whole organ level aside from cancer which only takes one mutant cell to kill you.

[kerrin]

Helpful answer. Thanks.

Earlier you wrote:
...when there is a sweeping ban on the use of federal tax dollars for stem cell research it really does throw a wrench in the all of the existing machinery, because all of it is at least partially funded by the feds. That means if 1 federal dollar went to building...[anything]...you couldn't do stem cell research there.
This is intriguing to me. Where can I read about this or are there any sources I can reference when passing this information along?

[eternaltraveler]

ah sure,

off the top of my head this was the whole reason harvard built separate facilities for use in their embryonic stem cell research iniative (funded privately).

Here is one of the first articles I found when doing a google search for this

http://hst.mit.edu/articles/Headline_Daley.pdf

in the article
Under the current rules, though, scientists interested in working with newer human embryonic stem cells have to keep that work separate from any research done with federal money. Most university research scientists survive on research grants from the federal government, and a portion of these grants typically goes to support the basic infrastructure behind any investigation, including the lab and its equipment. If that equipment was then used in embryonic stem cell work, the government could in theory shut off its funding to that laboratory

You can find more similar articles if you do a search for harvard's stem cell institute.