I find it odd that the only moral issue people seem to find with procedures like this is whether it is okay to kill an egg cell, or an early stage embryo.<p>These egg cells don't grow on trees. They must be harvested from human beings. Egg cell harvesting is a complex process, requiring the donors (young women) to take experimental drugs with possibly harmful long term sideeffects.<p>If we are using human egg cells for experiments, or at some point in the future, for curing old people, aren't we exploiting the young woman we take those egg cells from?
Not completely related since "the embryos created in these recent experiments may have certain limitations that would prevent them from giving rise to a human clone", I was thinking how would a clone embryo differ from a twin? We know that environmental factors physically change twins, and that also applies to clones. So if we consider twins to be different people, we should also consider a clone to be a different person.Then why all the pushback and "laws explicitly banning human reproductive cloning"?
How does it relate to this discovery: <a href="https://news.virginia.edu/content/uva-smashes-barrier-growing-organs-stem-cells" rel="nofollow">https://news.virginia.edu/content/uva-smashes-barrier-growin...</a>
("By manipulating the appropriate signaling, the U.Va. researchers have turned embryonic stem cells into a fish embryo, essentially controlling embryonic development.")
The WSJ article is pretty damn light, and is just an update of a May 2013 article.<p>Original source publication:<p><a href="http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1934590914001374" rel="nofollow">http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1934590914...</a>
This is wonderful news for the many women who are currently forced to carry someone else's child via in-vitro fertilization if they want a child. Hopefully they'll be able to have a child that is biologically theirs in a reasonable timeframe as further developments occur.
Genetics major here - I think I'm going to be sick. I have no problem using genetics as a source code from which to print replacement parts if you will, but the idea of creating life from an existing person terrifies me for some reason. Is our future some version of an awful Bruckheimer movie (The Island)?