Stem Cell Cloning Breakthrough

[Zkribbler]

So you're saying that by cloning myself, I am creating a soul?

What if I use all the embryonic stems cells to repair my spinal cord? Does that second soul get absorbed back into my orignial soul?

[Krill]

Zkrib, don't complain. Sell you first soul to Lucifer and then clone yourself, steal the soul from the clone and buy youy way into heaven

[Zkribbler]

Actually, I'm Just trying to learn if social conservatives have moral qualms about the following hypothetical:

[quote]
I have an injured spinal cord. I harvest my own skin cells, use them to generate stems cells, transform those skin cells into nerve cells, and use those nerve cells to regenerate my injured spinal cord.
[quote]

I understand their reluctance to harvest stem cells from embryos. I'm wondering if they have the same reluctance to use stem cells harvested from my own body.

[Zkribbler]

A thought just struck me.

...they had successfully cloned rhesus macaque embryos using DNA from skin cells taken from the ear of a 9-year-old male. The resulting stem cells grew into viable heart and nerve cells, among others

I think "embryo" is being misused in that sentence (and in my earlier posts). Embryonic stems cells come from embryos. [duh!] There's no embryo involved here, just regular ol' stem cells.

[DirtyMartini]

[SIZE=1] I understand their reluctance to harvest stem cells from embryos. I'm wondering if they have the same reluctance to use stem cells harvested from my own body.

See my previous post -- It's hard for me to imagine anyone having a problem with that if it were possible.

Then again, someone might decide that theoretically, that stem cell you've created has the theoretical potential to be any type of cell, so maybe, possibly it theoretically has the potential to be an enbryo, then a whole human, so now you can't use it. You must instead buy it a car when it turns 16 and put it through college.

edit: re: your above post. "Regular" stem cells are vanishingly rare and hard to isolate. Almost all stem cell research is embryonic stem cell research.

They took a monkey embryo, broke it up, took one embryonic cell, sucked the DNA out, injected the DNA from the 9 year old monkey's ear cell, and this resulting cell grew into monkey bits.

[DinoDoc]

Originally posted by Krill
By that logic identical twins have only 1 soul between them.

Why?

[Zkribbler]

This is how the article describes the process:

They transferred the entire skin cell into an egg from which the nucleus had been removed. "The egg within two days was able to reprogram the somatic cell into an early embryonic stem cell," he said.

Use of the egg to create the cells would constitute creating "embryonic stem cells."

Putting myself into the mind set of a social conservative, there would be no moral distinction between using the stems cells from an ordinary embryo or one that had been created using this process. So, despite my earlier hopes, this process does not avoid their concerns.

[DirtyMartini]

OK, I didn't read the article, and may be behind on cloning technology.

The holy grail of stem cell research would be to find a mature cell line (such as skin cells) that could be safely harvested without harm to the donor/patient, then to cause that cell line to dedifferentiate into a stem cells, then to cause these stem cells to differentiate into, say, nerve cells.

As it stands, the first step of just finding a cell line that could be caused to dedifferentiate would be great, as then research could proceed without all the sticky issues involved with embryonic stem cells.