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To: MHGinTN
Nah. You said something along the lines of stimulating mitosis in diploid cells was creating potential individuality, or something to that effect. Well, diploid cells are pretty much all we've got to work with, so by that definition, I'm essentially toying with human life by, say, causing skin cells to replicate in the lab. Needless to say, any definition of "human life" that stretches out that far is going to wind up creating some perverse effects - your tonsils have a full complement of diploid cells, some of which may even manage to replicate just after being removed from your throat. But if and when that happens, if it hasn't already, I don't really think you'll be planning a funeral for the tragic loss of potential human life that your tonsils represent.

Stem cells are the organs of the embryo. Toenails are tissue of the organism. A kidney is an organ within the organism.

Just because a thing is differentiated into various substructures and organs and parts doesn't make it an organism unto itself, and certainly doesn't make it an embryo. The front end of your large intestine is remarkably different from the back end, but that doesn't make your large intestine an organism unto itself. Every one of your cells is composed of specialized parts and structures and organelles - not one of them is capable of ever surviving on its own. The fact that parthenotes have undergone some differentiation from cells that are akin to stem cells does not make them embryos. Whether embryonic me was me all along is neither here nor there - with parthenotes, there's nobody at home, and there's never going to be anybody at home.

133 posted on 04/24/2003 11:53:00 PM PDT by general_re (You're just jealous because the voices are talking to me....)
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To: general_re; Coleus; Remedy; cpforlife.org; Polycarp; hocndoc; Mr. Silverback; Skywalk; ...
Just because a thing is differentiated into various substructures and organs and parts doesn't make it an organism unto itself, and certainly doesn't make it an embryo. Let me be very clear on this point, IT DOES MEAN THAT IS AN INDIVIDUAL, DUDE! IT differentiates those organs and substructures and parts of itself, of its self, its individual body. Taking a haploid cell and stimulating it to reproduce copies of the single cell isn't conceiving an embryonic individual human life. Taking a female ovum with the full complement of 46 chromosomes and electrically stimulating that cell to form an embryonic individual female duplicate of the parent donor is cloning a duplicate individual human life, albeit a likley severely handicapped individual being. That is the point over which we likely disagree: I don't define an embryo as a 'potential' individual, I define that embryo as THE individual in embryo age along the continuum of an individual human being's lifetime begun at the conception; I view any conceiving of an embryonic individual to be experimenting with an individual human being at embryo age for that individual human being.
139 posted on 04/25/2003 10:01:21 AM PDT by MHGinTN (If you can read this, you've had life support from someone. Promote Life Support for others.)
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