Good News for Everyone
Recently, with Christmas still over a month away, two independent teams of scientists gave the world an early holiday present. And this is a gift that may keep on giving for years to come.
I’m talking, of course, about the announcment on November 20th that researchers had converted ordinary human skin cells into embryonic stem cells. They did this by simply adding four genes that caused these cells to de-differentiate into a “pluripotent” form. If the works holds up, such cells could become the foundation for growing all kinds of starter cells, with the promise of cures for heart disease, Parkinson’s disease, and diabetes, to name just a few possibilities. According to the New York Times:
Researchers and ethicists not involved in the findings say the work, conducted by independent teams from Japan and Wisconsin, should reshape the stem cell field. At some time in the near future, they said, today’s debate over whether it is morally acceptable to create and destroy human embryos to obtain stem cells should be moot.
There is still a lot of work to be done, and actual clinical trials on humans may actually be years away. But the ethical concerns that have so bitterly divided our society on this issue may be alleviated.
Imagine — men and women of good faith, from all different religions and worldviews, working together to solve the health problems of humanity.
Stay tuned. This could be a wonderful Christmas present indeed.
CedarEthics » Blog Archive » Maybe Not So Good News? wrote,
[...] In a recent post, entitled “Good News for Everyone,” we rejoiced over the news that two independent teams of researchers had converted ordinary human skin cells into embryonic stem cells. They started out with human fibroblasts, then inserted four genes that caused the cells to become pluripotent, that is, to have the ability to grow into all the major tissues of the adult human body. This has great promise for medical research, and may offer eventual cures for a variety of chronic diseases. I guess the “devil” is in the details. At the time I wrote my first post, I did not yet have access yet to the Science article in which the Thomson team (Wisconsin) first reported their results. But I found this out indirectly from a blog post: [T]hey tested this combination of genes in a commercially available, genetically modified cell culture, IMR90 fetal fibroblasts. (These cells were cultured from a little girl aborted at 16 weeks gestation). These cells are fetal cells, not adult cells, and they were chosen because they have been studied and the genome is well known. Blog source According to LifeSite News, both research teams “used several versions of the 293 aborted fetal cell lines to modify the DNA of the host adult skin cells, in order to accomplish the reprogramming.” Ethically, this clouds the picture quite a bit. The fact that they used a culture of cells from an abortion that took place in the past nonetheless raises questions about moral complicity. This would be similar to the use of vaccines derived from aborted fetal research (several of such vaccines are still in use today). There are other ethical ways to produce the DNA needed for transformation, efficiently and morally,” according to biotech industry analyst Dr. Theresa Deisher. “If these means were employed to produce the needed DNA, there would be no moral issues with the use of reprogrammed adult cells for research. (Web site source) I can still hope that future developments will not cut ethical corners, and human personhood and dignity may yet be upheld in subsequent research. But I’m not holding my breath. Original Scientific Papers: Takahashi, et al (Yamanaka research group in Kyoto, Japan) Yu, et al (Thomson research group in Wisconsin) [...]
Link | January 12th, 2008 at 11:49 am