Stem cell breakthrough promises to overcome ethical objections. I don't know, this is going to be all over the news, well, it already is. I don't think Ramesh Ponnuru or Kathryn Lopez are going to shut up about it for a long time. I am cautiously optimistic, but unfortunately this will be immediately heralded and accepted because of the ethical issues that some have with embryonic stem cells, whether it turns out to be a dead end or not. I have no great insights on this, so go read the articles, or check out the other ScienceBlogs (I happened to check google news, so that's why I hit it first).
Update: Ah, I spoke too soon. Devil-boy Jake Young already blogged it. As I thought.
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I would be remiss if I didn't address the latest stem cell news, since it's already all over the place. An article from today's issue of published in advance online yesterday by Nature describes a technique for deriving a line of human embryonic stem cells by removing a single cell from the eight-…
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I put a summary of the paper here.
Take home: great paper and clever idea, but the immediate utility of this is overblown.
the thing is that you wouldn't even have been able to develop this technology omelette without breaking quite a few eggs (or sperm + eggs as the case may be).
also, there are known to be some issues w/ elevated birth defects associated w/ ICSI and similar manipulations of embryos...it remains to be seen whether the embryos allowed to develop from this procedure are actually normal. My bet is that they're at elevated risk for birth defects.
Is it particularly ethical to risk giving an otherwise healthy child birth defects because of someone *else's* hangups about embryo manipulation?
gc,
the people with hangups would say yes. i checked the corner, at least they aren't going buckwild....
Is it particularly ethical to risk giving an otherwise healthy child birth defects because of someone *else's* hangups about embryo manipulation?
It is one of the peculiar ironies of how society thinks about early stage life that many would consider it more ethical to outright destroy embryos than to increase their risks of birth defects but not destroy them. The idea is, I guess, that there's a certain window in which one can do pretty much anything to an embryo and have it be a morally neutral issue -- but that allowing the results of that fooling around to grow past a certain stage (to where someone with the resulting problems might actually be seen or talk to you) has moral weight. It's not a viewpoint that makes intuitive sense to me, but I take it that's how it works.
As for whether anti-embryo destruction folks will be impressed: I would say generally not very. The issue of birth defects will weight heavily with us as well. And many of those who are against embryo destruction are against IVF generally.
The idea is, I guess, that there's a certain window in which one can do pretty much anything to an embryo and have it be a morally neutral issue -- but that allowing the results of that fooling around to grow past a certain stage (to where someone with the resulting problems might actually be seen or talk to you) has moral weight. It's not a viewpoint that makes intuitive sense to me, but I take it that's how it works.
Well, much of the debate in this area is based on emotion. People feel emotion when they see a 4D ultrasound of a smiling baby in the womb; they don't feel emotion when they look at an 8 celled embryo. All moral reasoning is based on our evolutionary history; we've evolved to feel affection towards faces of babies, to feel guilt as a way of chemically enforcing contracts, and to be repelled when faced with vectors of disease like excrement or insects.
In short, someone who gets worked up over the plight of an embryo probably hasn't seen one; whereas someone who doesn't feel a twinge at a late term abortion probably hasn't seen a 4D ultrasound. It's feelings that rule the day here -- and once we acknowledge that, we acknowledge that we pay a much heavier emotional (and financial) cost when dealing with a deformed baby than we do when we send an 8-celled microscopic lump down the drain.
They're baaaaaaack....
http://scienceblogs.com/scientificactivist/2006/11/the_return_of_ethically_sound.php