Debate on interspecies cloning reignites

NF Reporter · 03-26-2007, 04:06 AM

AP - It was nearly a decade ago that Jose Cibelli plugged his own DNA into a cow's egg in a novel cloning attempt that was condemned as unethical by President Clinton and landed the Michigan State University researcher in a mess of controversy.

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Lygeia · 03-30-2007, 04:35 PM

The attempt ten years ago to greate an interspecies (cow/human) was weird. It seems now the controversy continues but the end result isint to create an interspecies, but stem cells to solve diseases like Alzheimers. The latter is fine, the interspecies thing is...SCI FI

waltky · 03-12-2008, 04:59 PM

Pope Benny don't want no cloning around...

Vatican Lists New Sin: DNA Manipulation
March 10, 2008 - Church Official Also Lists Drugs And Pollution As Sins With "Social Resonance"

Quote:

Sinning has gone global, according to a Vatican official who has singled out genetic experiments, pollution and mind-damaging drugs as among today's new sins. Also receiving fresh attention by the Vatican are society's injustices, along the lines of the age-old maxim: "The rich get richer while the poor get poorer." After last year's "Ten Commandments" against road rage and other sins committed behind the wheel, the Vatican has provided its latest update on how God's law is being violated with modern means.

"The poor are always becoming poorer and the rich ever more rich, feeding unsustainable social injustice," Monsignor Gianfranco Girotti, the head of the Apostolic Penitentiary, told the Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore Romano in an interview published Sunday. Girotti was asked what, in his opinion, are the "new sins." He cited "violations of the basic rights of human nature" through genetic manipulation; drugs which "weaken the mind and cloud intelligence" as well as imbalances between rich and poor.

"If yesterday sin had a rather individualistic dimension, today it has a weight, a resonance, that's especially social, rather than individual," said the monsignor, whose office deals with matters of conscience and grants absolution. Vatican officials stressed that Girotti's comments broke no new ground on what constitutes sin.

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waltky · 07-04-2008, 01:43 AM

Now they gonna be makin' pig-people in England...

Human-pig hybrid embryos given go ahead
01/07/2008 : A licence to create human-pig embryos to study heart disease has been issued by the fertility watchdog.

Quote:

This marks the third animal-human hybrid embryo licence to be issued by Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority and the first since the Commons voted in favour of this controversial research last month. An HFEA spokesman said it had approved an application from the Clinical Sciences Research Institute, University of Warwick, for the creation of hybrid embryos. The centre has been offered a 12 month licence with effect from today, July 1. The effort at the University of Warwick is led by Professor Justin St John. "This new license allows us to attempt to make human pig clones to produce embryonic stem cells," he said, where embryonic stem cells are able to turn into the 200 plus types in the body.

"We will take skin cells from patients who have a mutation for certain kinds of heart disease (cardiomyopathy, which makes the heart lose its pumping strength) and put them into pig eggs after their chromosomes have been removed. We will then make embryos so that we can attempt to derive embryonic stem cells which will allow us to study some of the molecular mechanisms associated with these heart diseases. "Ultimately they will help us to understand where some of the problems associated with these diseases arise and they could also provide models for the pharmaceutical industry to test new drugs. We will effectively be creating and studying these diseases in a dish.

"But it's important to say that we're at the very early stages of this research and it will take a considerable amount of time. There is still a great deal to learn about these techniques and much of our early work will involve understanding how we can make the hybrid cloning process as efficient as possible." The study is aimed at understanding the way power-producing structures in cells, called mitochondria, are passed from egg to embryo. In the hybrid, the mitochondria mostly come from the egg, initially making up around half of the DNA by weight, and the team will do experiments in order to ensure that the trace of human mitochondrial DNA takes over, not least because it is designed to work with human nuclear DNA.

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Eagle One · 07-10-2008, 10:09 AM

Sinning has gone global, according to a Vatican official who has singled out genetic experiments, pollution and mind-damaging drugs as among today's new sins. Also receiving fresh attention by the Vatican are society's injustices, along the lines of the age-old maxim: "The rich get richer while the poor get poorer."

I'm looking for the news flash here, the stroke of brilliance, the genius' insight.
>Sinning has gone global? When was sinning not "global, in the Garden of Eden?
>Genetic experiments are a sin? So was autopsies and cutting up bodies for medical research. Bring on the research.
>Pollution is a sin? This is true to a point, so I'll ask the Vatican; should we go back to the Dark Ages, or just remove three billion people from the planet to lighten the load.
>Mind-damaging drugs are new? Hallucinogenic plants were used in rituals during prehistoric times. Opiates and many recreational drugs have been used for centuries.

I think the Vatican has good intentions, but these 'Chicken Little' sound bytes need to be reconsidered.