Those "monsters" keep my 9 year old son alive.
If researchers were able to create a pig pancreas that was human enough that it would not be rejected, we would jump at the chance to have it implanted. Assuming trials showed it to be safe.
What about the genetically modified bacteria which make human insulin - are those "monsters"?
Those "monsters" keep my 9 year old son alive.
If researchers were able to create a pig pancreas that was human enough that it would not be rejected, we would jump at the chance to have it implanted. Assuming trials showed it to be safe.
Precisely my point. I had three diabetic grandparents and two diabetic parents - I know at some point I will become insulin-dependent. But where do we draw the line between "acceptable" and "unacceptable" biomedical research? I don't think that these transgenic creatures are at all a problem; some people do.
But where do we stop..? Do we go back to treating disease by Age Of Faith means?
In Great Britain, scientists cloned pigs without certain genes that would cause rejection by humans with the plan to harvest them for their organs for xenotransplantation. There has been discussion as to whether Orthodox Jews could accept them (Consensus was, yes, to save life is good). Unfortunately, even the pigs they thought were completely free of risk turned out to have some sort of pig viral infection.Do a google search on "xenotransplantation pigs."
The genetically modified bacteria are proof that we have been lucky so far in our genetic modification of other life forms, including plants grown for food and all the E. coli that are producing pharmaceuticals. I remember the fuss in the popular press and popular science press back in the '70's and '80's. The fear was that one of the researchers would go in to the lab while sick, their E. coli would get mixed up with the lab specimens which would all become super-bugs resistant to antibiotics....
Of course, we shouldn't have worried about what would happen in the lab, we had toddlers for that.
Some (Julie Zoloff in Texas's Legislative Stem Cell forum, yesterday, for one) say that the cloning and stem cell bans in France and Canada were backlash against genetically modified foods.
The difference is that so far, single traits have been transmitted into simple - even non-motile - organisms in what were originally very controlled environments.
That doesn't mean that this science should not be done. But, there should be more restraint than has been shown by the experimenters in this article.