Do you remember “The Island of Doctor Moreau“, or the ’30’s movie version “Island of Lost Souls“? Forgive me then, if that is the first thing that pops into my mind when I read an article like this, from the island of Once-Great Britain
British scientists have today have been given the go-ahead to create part-human, part-animal embryos.
The Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA) granted licences to conduct research using hybrids – made from animal eggs that have had their nucleus replaced with human genetic code.
Researchers will now use the technique to create embryonic stem cells in order to study the causes of and develop treatments for diseases such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, cystic fibrosis, motor neurone disease (MND) and Huntington’s.
Just because you can, doesn’t mean that you should. One of the traits that mankind has that sets us above the rest of Creation is a sense of right and wrong, a sense of ethics. But when you believe that life is an accidental, random happening billions of years ago in the primordial goo, it becomes easier to believe that you are the center of the universe and that you’re entitled to do whatever you want. Ethics? “Ethical is whatever we say it is”. Including mixing animal embryos with human genetic material…
… “What? You have a problem with that?”
Dr Stephen Minger and colleagues at King’s College want to use the cloned hybrid embryos from cow, rabbit, sheep and goat eggs to create embryonic stem cells carrying the defects responsible for a range of serious diseases.
Dr Lyle Armstrong and Dr Majlinda Lako at the North East England Stem Cell Institute in Newcastle plan to insert human skin cells into cow eggs to study how eggs can reprogramme adult tissues into more primitive cells.
“While scientists may prefer to use human eggs, these are in short supply and preference should rightly be for their use in treating infertility.”
Recent developments in stem cell research indicate that embryonic research and cloning is unnecessary, because they have found that great things can be done with adult stem cells, which do not require the destruction of human embryos.
Reports from four of the leading international laboratories working in ES cell research have shown that pluripotent stem (iPS) cells can be induced from adult mouse and human cells. These iPS cells have been shown to have all the properties previously attributed to ES cells, and thus provide a means of preparing individually tailored pluripotent cells without the ethical problems involved in therapeutic cloning.
To this must be added the fact that iPS cells can readily be prepared, whereas human therapeutic cloning has never been achieved. If it ever had been, it is such an inefficient process that it would always have required unacceptably large numbers of egg donations by women. The recently published first success with therapeutic cloning in a primate required 304 monkey eggs to be provided in order to produce two ES cell lines.
Ethics is a difficult subject from the start. I believe it becomes impossible when your starting place is primordial goo. Laugh at me all you want for my belief in the Creator and His requirement that our stewardship of His creation be according to His rules (yes, “ethical”). Money, fame, scientific curiosity, and technical ability are poor foundations for making decisions concerning meddling with the intricacies of life. Comes a time when you reach a point you should fear to go further. I think we’re there, but no one seems to care.
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