Can Seaweed Prevent Tumors Caused by Embryonic Stem Cells?
Science is reporting that one of the seemingly intractable problems facing ESCR has been the propensity of embryonic stem cells to cause tumors, may have been solved. Researchers in Australia believe they may have found a way to prevent tumor formation by encompassing the cells in seaweed extract, which animal studies seem to show prevents tumor formation.
If true, it is a remarkably imaginative approach. But that does not solve the moral problem. Tumorless embryonic stem cells remain ethically contentious since extracting them involves treating a nascent human organism like a crop to be sown and harvested. Moreover, there is good evidence that the "leftover IVF embryos that are going to be destroyed anyway," will not be the primary source of ES cells in the future. The real agenda of Big Biotech and its university business partners/ideological allies is human cloning--first to obtain cloned embryonic stem cells, and later, for the sophisticated development of cloned later-stage embryos and fetuses using artificial wombs.
Lest you think I am alarmist, Missouri's Amendment 2 permits embryos to be implanted, so long as the gestation does not enter the fetal stage of gestation (which begins at 8 weeks). New Jersey goes even further, permitting outright fetal farming up to and including the moment just prior to birth. Both of these measures could have easily prevented any implantation--but did not do so. Surely, this is not an accidental lapse.
Meanwhile, the federal fetal farming ban only prohibits implantation of embryos for research purposes in women or animal uteruses. That's fine. But, I have always believed the fetal farming would be primarily conducted in artificial wombs, since such contraptions would permit easy access to the growing embryo/fetus for experimentation. P.S. Artificial wombs should be available for human use within ten years.
posted by Wesley J. Smith @ 9:01 AM
5 Comments
5 Comments:
Have you heard or seen anything concrete on artificial wombs? Or is that speculative science fiction at this moment in time?
I have seen that they have successfully implanted a human embryo and kept it going for about a week. There have also been successes in animal studies. The time estimate was told to me by various scientists. When I get time, I will look into the actual state of the science more closely.
Here's what I don't get: Why?
What's the point of cloning? This doesn't make any sense to me. Yes, I do understand the technical "why" answers - people want to be able to clone themselves so that they can harvest body parts for their own use and thus live exceedingly long lives because they've managed to convince themselves that life ends at death and existence is pointless unless you have a lot of it. I grasp that.
What I don't understand is why people aren't more horrified at the thought of living an unnaturally extended life, using another living being to sustain one's own life, or losing all humanity and implanting your brain in a machine. A machine! Goodness sakes...
Yes, death scares me, before anybody asks. I'm not crazy about the notion of dying, and I don't like the uncertainity of what comes after. But, as Plato put it, there are two options - either life continues or it doesn't. If it doesn't, then there's nothing to fear because nothing just isn't all that scary, and if it does, then you have the pleasure of seeing what comes after.
The notion of eternal life is fine, if one recognizes eternal life as living in the ever-present moment. But immortality, keeping this body alive forever, is horrifying to contemplate. The human body shuts down after a period of time. Why it does so we really don't know, though people have their own philosophies about that. But we do stop. Death is as natural as childbirth.
Distorting either birth or death... why would anyone be compelled to do something like that? Everything that is beautiful and natural is destroyed in such a case.
So, I guess Soylent Green is people.
Why not?
Karmatic justice.
I'm not exactly speaking in the religious sense here. If you're like me and religious (I'm Catholic) then you believe that justice is imposed from the outside, and there you go. But there's a way to take a secular angle of this idea.
Natural law operates the universe (nevermind for the moment where natural law came from to begin with). The more you monkey with natural law the more that smooth operation will start getting bumpy. Equal and opposit reactions - the tighter you stretch nature, the harder the recoil when it finally snaps. You don't have to be religious to realize that the more you screw around with the system the more devestating the impact will be when everything goes wrong.
Take this whole "seaweed prevents turmors cauesed by ES cells" bit. We use embriotic stem cells. They cause tumors. We prevent the tumors using seaweed. Now these ES cells have a chance to sit in the body longer; the result is that something new happens to the body, something we never projected for, and the snowball gets rolling down hill.
"...the flesh as a problem of technology... how can we get it to work better..."
The old "human body as hardware" line of reasoning, eh? That only goes so far. If the body is hardware, then the mind (or soul in my case) is software, and you can't affect one without totally screwing up the other. Software needs a working interface that won't cause hiccoughs in the programming. Nobody takes this into account! How is a person supposed to adapt to radical changes made for the fun of it?
The whiplash is going to seriously take some people out if they don't realize the risk they're running. Nature wants balance and order, and if we go frying that balance and order, plain ol' death is going to seem like paradise compared to what we're going to end up doing to ourselves in the long run.
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