How to Farm Stem Cells Without Losing Your Soul

A solution to the stem cell dilemma that even the Vatican can love.
By Clive ThompsonPage 1 of 4 next »


Feature:
How to Farm Stem Cells Without Losing Your Soul

William Hurlbut clicks his laptop, and an x-ray pops up on the projection screen behind him. It's a picture of a tumor in a woman's ovary - a ghostly blob floating near the spine. In the middle are several strange, Chiclet-shaped nodules. "Those white opacities," Hurlbut says, "are actually fully formed teeth."

A few audience members blanch. Though we're in an ordinary conference room in Rome, it feels like church. The seats are filled with some of the Vatican's top thinkers, including a dozen men in clerical dress, a nun in a flowing brown habit, and a Dominican priest whose prayer beads quietly clatter. Hurlbut, a bioethicist from Stanford, has traveled here to tell them about a new way to create human embryonic stem cells.

As you might expect, the Vatican is vehemently opposed to embryonic stem cell science. President Bush is also wary, and two years ago he all but banned federal funding for it. But most medical scientists remain convinced that stem cells hold the key to a new kind of healing: regenerative medicine. Embryonic stem cells are pluripotent, meaning that they have the ability to develop into any type of human tissue. If that capacity could be harnessed and directed, injury and disease need no longer be crippling. For example, new neurons grown from stem cells might reverse the damage from Alzheimer's and repair severed spinal cords. But the research requires growing - and destroying - embryos in the lab. Hurlbut, however, claims he has a method for harvesting embryonic stem cells without killing human embryos.

The proof is projected on the screen. The x-ray shows a teratoma, a naturally occurring tumor that grows from an egg or sperm cell. Like an embryo, a teratoma produces stem cells. But the teratoma does not have the right balance of gene expression to create a fully integrated organism. So it grows into a dense ball of teeth, hair, and skin, a ghastly grab bag of organs like some randomly constructed Frankenstein. Hurlbut points to the x-ray. "They're about the ugliest thing in medicine," he says, "but they might offer us a solution to our stem cell dilemma."

In a bit of diplomacy that may satisfy both the scientists and the theologians, Hurlbut advocates genetically altering cloned embryos so, like a teratoma, they wouldn't have the DNA necessary to become viable humans. For the first few days of existence, they would grow normally and produce stem cells, but then die when a critical embryonic component - say, a placenta - failed to emerge. "They would have no coherent drive in the direction of mature human form," Hurlbut tells the crowd. "It's analogous to growing skin in a tissue culture. Such an entity would never rise to the level of a human being." You could grow them in vats, kill them at will, and never risk offending God. As both a medical doctor and a deeply religious Christian, Hurlbut borrows from each side: It's a theological breakthrough in the form of a scientific technique....cont'd

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.06/stemcells.html?tw=wn_tophead_4

I sure as shit have misplaced it.

But it sounds like this compromise really makes neither side happy. Why not do the sensible thing and, with permission of the "parents" use stem cells that would be "killed" (wasted) in fertility clinics? If that isn't acceptable to the anti-abortion people, they should be picketing fertility clinics.

and safe deposite box...looks at inventory on household items...looks in "special" box under the old baseball card and japanese coins...hmmm...what was that thing called again? a soul? but not the things on the bottom of my shoes correct? hmmm...don't seem to have one of those? must not be important.

Good to have new breakthrough to harvest stem cells.

In fact, nobody baptize embryos, nobody demand to bury embryos like real souls, and nobody care for the control of the lab throwing away embryos like dog meats.

The one major question I want to pose to the Rethugs pandering to the religious RW is why they don't try to outlaw the fertility clinics that create the embryos knowing that some of them are going to be thrown away? They keep saying that "life" shouldn't be destroyed for theraputic purposes. So, it's ok to create "life" then throw the leftovers in the trash?

I'm not sure this idea will win points with the squeamish.

There was a very good documentary on terratomas that were lodged inside their birth twin and lived for several years. It's a frightfully complex matter to remove them.

I think the fundies will have problem with the words "genetically alter" and "clone".

A woman produces...hundreds (?) of ova that don't get fertilized. Men produce an infinitely huge number of sperm that even under the best conditions don't get the prize and die off.

So I guess genetically altering an *unfertilized* ovum and then letting it attempt to fertilize would be the idea. The fundies will probably decry the zygote's "potential" and then they'll move to include a pre-fertilization period into the human lifetime.