Kansas City Star Also Inaccurately Describes Therapeutic Cloning
As regular readers of Secondhand Smoke know, I am still looking for a mainstream media outlet to accurately describe somatic cell nuclear transfer cloning, one that simply acknowledges that cloning creates an embryo, which is destroyed for research, or perhaps, (in the far distant future) for use in medical treatments. I am not asking for condemnation. Just accuracy in reportage.
This seems like a vain quest. Comes now the Kansas City Star with an editorial seeking to garner support for a proposed Missouri initiative that would create a state constitutional right to engage in human SCNT, which, following the usual pattern, is blatantly misdescribed: "Opponents are objecting to a procedure that involves scooping genetic material from a human egg and replacing it with DNA from a patient's body cell. Researchers, using chemicals and nutrients, coax the egg into dividing, producing a ball of about 300 cells. Healthy stem cells are harvested from the ball. Scientists think those stem cells have the potential to cure diseases and rebuild the body after devastating injuries." (My italics.)
Notice the editorial states that the egg produces the "healthy stem cells." If the editorial writer were a high school biology student answering a test, he or she would fail. The egg doesn't divide. Once the cloning is completed, it ceases to exist. The cloned embryo is the organism that creates the embryonic stem cells, which is destroyed to obtain them.
Notice too, the stem cells are not even identified as embryonic.
Yes, this is an editorial. But opinion should be based on accurately presented facts, not upon what National Review's Ramesh Ponnoru calls a game of "hide the embryo."
posted by Wesley J. Smith @ 8:23 PM
4 Comments
4 Comments:
Actually, calling what results from therapeutic cloning an embryo is not accurate. An embryo is a result of an egg being fertilized by a sperm and developing from there.
In this cloning procedure, scientists remove the nucleus and the DNA from an egg cell and replace it with DNA taken from a human adult donor cell (this cell must not be an egg or sperm cell in order to work) The altered egg cell then has an electric current applied to it to and it acts as though it has just been fertilized and the cell divides much like an embryo. But, since the egg cell was altered and was never actually fertilized, it is NOT an embryo. It does not contain the DNA of two people.
Calling the result of this process an egg is not accurate, but neither is embryo. Science here has created something entirely different, something for which we have no name.
You want to call it an embryo so you can claim that a child is being killed. But no child is being killed since no child has been created.
Funny, but I think I have a more meaningful definition of human life than you do. A cell that has been gutted of all its own genetic material and had other genetic material added by scientists in a lab to me is not a human being. What is a human being is the sick or injured person who could be cured by the replacement organs that they should one day be able to grow from those stem cells.
While you worry about the microscopic cells growing in a dish, the scientists and doctors will continue to worry about all the sick and injured people who are waiting for a cure. While people like you cause the deaths of human beings by delaying the cure, the doctors and scientists and citizens like me who have our priorities straight will work to make the wait for those cures as short as possible so as few people die as possible.
Pardon my frankness, but the above post by palebluedot is terrible.
Edification can be found here, in the journal Nature:
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v436/n7047/pdf/436002b.pdf
There's a subscription required, so I've cut/pasted the brief in its entirety to my own blog:
http://www.livejournal.com/users/the_august
This is pretty much required reading if you want to have any opinion whatsoever as far as most people are concerned.
So, do you want to disagree with the paragon of modern biology, Nature?
Denying a life form exists because it came into existance via alternate means from gamete fusion is an appalling arbitrary decision on your part. After the nuclear transfer and epigenetic reprogramming by maternal factors originally found in the egg, the result is a fully viable, fully functional human organism that immediately starts cleavage and morulation precisely as found during typical gamete fusion, what you call "an embryo."
One could just as easily arbitrarily decide that what's created from IVF isn't "an embryo" because IVF is different from the normal after in utero fertilization.
It's so depressing to see people try as hard as they do to explain away the factual reality of cloning.
Secondly, you cowardly make the accusation that the author of this blog is... well... directly responsible for the misery, torture and suffering of sick people.
Hello? There's SO MUCH potential to be found in adult stem cells. I would imagine that the author of this blog would be in favor of increasing spending on research in these areas.
The fact is, adult stem cell research has such a tremendous head-start over embryonic research that to trot out the "we need cures and we need 'em fast, and you're responsible for my son's suffering from diabetes!" argument is utterly ridiculous.
(And not for lack of funding or trying... much research has been done attempting to learn mastery of embryonic stem cells and how they can be used in non-human animals (the idea being that anything learned would almost certainly be directly transferrable from, say, mouse to human) with little success - adult stem cells are simply much easier to control in general...)
If a speedy cure is to be found, it is almost certainly adult stem cell therapies that you should be clamoring to be funded.
Hmmm, may I add that this Nature article was pointed out in this blog a couple of weeks ago:
link
I suggest that bluedot go into my articles archives to see my piece about how the new tactic was politically, rather than science, driven. Indeed, the reason why pro therapeutic cloners want to ban implantation is because a cloned embryo could theoretically be gestated into a cloned baby. If it were mere cells, that would not happen in a billion years. Spin. Hype. A corruption of science.
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