The fierce public debate over killing human embryos to create lines of embryonic stem cells is over; tout fini; THE END. It was buried with a stake thrust through its heart by a study published in the world’s most prestigious science magazine, Nature. Trust the media:
- “Embryos Spared in Stem Cell Creation” (USA Today)
On second thought, don’t trust the media.
In fact none of the 16 embryos involved in the study by medical director Robert Lanza of Advanced Cell Technology (ACT) survived. All were harmed; none were viable; none were spared. When a member of ACT’s research advisory panel, Ronald Green, told the Washington Post “You can honestly say this cell line is from an embryo that was in no way harmed or destroyed,” he couldn’t have been more dishonest.
For all the media mania, you’d never know the Lanza publication was just a 200-word letter that spent as much verbiage on theory as actually describing the experiment. As such, Nature had no business running it.
But as I’ve written elsewhere, Nature has long boosted embryonic stem cell (ESC) technology generally and the lifting of federal funding restrictions specifically, as has its American counterpart Science. Their eagerness to run anything promoting this view recently led to Science being forced to withdraw not one but two “ESC miracle breakthrough” articles.
Lanza’s team described their work in Nature as showing that a single cell pulled from the smallest human embryos (8-10 cells) can be made to divide in the laboratory a create a full cell line or “colony.” Since fertility doctors often remove a single cell from embryos this age to screen for genetic defects before in vitro fertilization – though it’s still unknown as to whether this will eventually harm the child – researchers could theoretically just use these “spares.”
But Lanza’s team didn’t just pluck one cell from each of the 16 embryos; they ripped them apart and used 4-7 cells. Continued... |