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Genetically engineered embryonic stem cells could be a viable option to electronic cardiac pacemakers. Since human embryonic stem cells have the capability to transform into any type of cell found in the human body, they have the potential to replace damaged cells of any type. So scientists at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in Baltimore, Maryland engineered, grew and developed them into heart cells. They then infused them with a gene that glows green to make them easily identifiable in the presence of other animal cells. Of the engineered cells grown, those that beat on their own (an indication they...

In Minnesota, pigs are being born with human blood in their veins. advertisement In Nevada, there are sheep whose livers and hearts are largely human. In California, mice peer from their cages with human brain cells firing inside their skulls. These are not outcasts from "The Island of Dr. Moreau," the 1896 novel by H.G. Wells in which a rogue doctor develops creatures that are part animal and part human. They are real creations of real scientists, stretching the boundaries of stem cell research.

Last summer, on the site of 35 former hat factories where toxic mercury was once used to cure pelts, city officials in Danbury, Conn., deployed a futuristic weapon: 160 Eastern cottonwoods. Dr. Richard Meagher, a professor of genetics at the University of Georgia, genetically engineered the trees to extract mercury from the soil, store it without being harmed, convert it to a less toxic form of mercury and release it into the air. It was one of two dozen proposals Dr. Meagher has submitted to various agencies over two decades for engineering trees to soak up chemicals from contaminated soil....

Genetically engineered crops do not pose health risks that cannot also arise from crops created by other techniques, including conventional breeding, the National Academy of Sciences said in a report issued yesterday. The conclusion backs the basic approach now underlying government oversight of biotech foods, that special food safety regulations are not needed just because foods are genetically engineered. Nevertheless, the report said that genetic engineering and other techniques used to create novel crops could result in unintended, harmful changes to the composition of food, and that scrutiny of such crops should be tightened before they go to market. "The...

Biologists are crafting libraries of interchangeable DNA parts and assembling them inside microbes to create programmable, living machines By W. Wayt Gibbs Evolution is a wellspring of creativity; 3.6 billion years of mutation and competition have endowed living things with an impressive range of useful skills. But there is still plenty of room for improvement. Certain microbes can digest the explosive and carcinogenic chemical TNT, for example--but wouldn't it be handy if they glowed as they did so, highlighting the location of buried land mines or contaminated soil? Wormwood shrubs generate a potent medicine against malaria but only in trace...

Tests Show U.S. Failure to Block Contamination From Gene-Altered Varieties Much of the U.S. supply of ordinary crop seeds has become contaminated with strands of engineered DNA, suggesting that current methods for segregating gene-altered seed plants from traditional varieties are failing, according to a pilot study released yesterday. More than two-thirds of 36 conventional corn, soy and canola seed batches contained traces of DNA from genetically engineered crop varieties in lab tests commissioned by the Union of Concerned Scientists, a Washington-based advocacy group. The actual amount of foreign DNA present in U.S. seeds appears to be small, and most engineered...

A new report commissioned by the government suggests that it will be difficult to completely prevent genetically engineered plants and animals from having unintended environmental and public health effects. The report, released yesterday by the National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences, says that while there are many techniques being developed to prevent genetically engineered organisms or their genes from escaping into the wild, most techniques are still in early development and none appear to be completely effective. "One of our big messages throughout the whole report is that there are very few bioconfinement methods that are well...

Move to Ban Altered Crops Is Focused on California Published: January 11, 2004 UKIAH, Calif., Jan. 10 (AP) — The center of the nation's anti-biotechnology movement can be found these days here in Mendocino County, a quirky region with a strong streak of independence. Farmers and businesses in this Northern California county are trying to persuade voters to pass a measure on March 2 that would prohibit genetically modified plants and animals from being raised or kept in the county. "I believe that genetic engineering at this stage is the biggest uncontrolled biological experiment going on in the world today,"...

An attempt to cure infertility by creating babies with three genetic parents was halted when twins died in the womb, it emerged yesterday. The experiment, in which researchers combined elements from two newly-conceived eggs to create a single viable embryo, was designed to help women whose eggs are not good enough to reactivate a pregnancy. But while two of the "reconstructed" embryos developed into foetuses in the womb, one died at 24 weeks and the other at 29 weeks. American researchers who handed the work over to colleagues in China, after the experiment was effectively banned in the United States,...

Three 'supercows' with the genetic potential to produce more than 14,000 litres of milk in a single lactation have been born in Adelaide. The calves, born two weeks ago, were the result of an agreement between Adelaide University and the world's leading artificial breeding organisation, Canadian-based Semex Alliance. Under the agreement, embryos were taken from renowned cow families at studs around the world, frozen in liquid nitrogen and flown to Australia from Canada and New Zealand. Adelaide University staff and students at Roseworthy campus then implanted the embryos into surrogate mother cows. Roseworthy farm acting general manager Matthew Bekker said...

Geron Corp on Wednesday said it had successfully transplanted heart muscle cells derived from human embryonic stem cells into the hearts of rats and that the human cells appeared to be dividing and forming new heart tissue in the rodents. The Menlo Park, California-based biotech firm said the human heart cells were transplanted into healthy rats, but that other studies will test whether such transplanted human cells can help animals that have suffered heart attacks. "These results exemplify one of the basic advantages of using human embryonic stem cell-derived cells for tissue engineering -- namely their ability to re-create the...

A critique of bioethics as it has developed in North America. One of the author's doctoral concentrations is in "secular bioethics" from the Kennedy Institute of Ethics, Georgetown University (1991). [Administrator] "Bioethics" -- the word sounds like old-fashioned medical ethics applied to new medical technology. It's the application of traditional philosophical or theological principles to the moral dilemmas created by, say, cloning or experimenting with new AIDS drugs, right? Not really. Like the word "bioethics" itself, which formally dates only from the early 1970's, the philosophical underpinnings of bioethics are completely different from those that underlie traditional medical ethics. Traditional...

"...Testifying earlier this year before the House Agriculture Committee, Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) explained that GM foods are banned in Europe "under the cloak of food safety" while protectionism is the true object. If higher yielding, less expensive and more nutritious foods enter their markets, domestic European agriculture is threatened. If Third World farmers are more able to feed their domestic populations with such crops, competing European imports would also be threatened - so much for Green Benevolence vs. Corporate Greed..."

BABI: Another Anti-Life Genetic Baby Package by Randy Engel Introduction BABI is the incredibly facetious acronym for blastomere analysis before implantation, the latest and most lethal prenatal diagnosis package for eugenic ends. The blastomere is the structure of cells resulting from the very earliest division of a fertilized egg or zygote. As with other forms of non-therapeutic first and second trimester prenatal diagnosis, the objective of BABI is to insure that offspring with genetic defects are killed before birth. However, BABI avoids the 'fuss and muss' of late-term eugenic abortion by accomplishing the killing of offspring at the earliest stages...

It is a common error in the customary pro-life position to equate practices which may well be considered diametrical opposites, abortion, which is meant solely to deprive a developing child of life, and cloning, which is undertaken to produce new life via radically new avenues. In a past essay of mine, “An Objectivist condemnation of abortion”, I have argued against a rationalization that Ms. Rand and her intellectual followers have provided for the termination of pregnancy. However, the remainder of the Randian position within the field of bioethics possesses innumerable advantages to both secular and religious pro-lifers alike, which will...

U.S. scientists have made a breakthrough which they believe could thwart one of the most nightmarish forms of terrorism -- an attack with antibiotic-resistant biological weapons. The scientists, investigating the biowarfare agent anthrax, say they have found a form of treatment that may make it virtually impossible for anthrax germs to mutate into a resistant strain. Similar methods could be used to fight a host of other infections, opening a new approach to the treatment of disease, scientists familiar with the research said. In a paper published in the British science journal Nature, researchers from the Rockefeller University in New...

Our Posthuman Future Consequences of the biotechnology revolution By Francis Fukuyama Farrar, Straus and Giroux 256 pgs. US$25/C$39.95 ISBN: 0-374-23643-7 Brave New World V2.0By Steven Martinovichweb posted April 22, 2002It would appear that history has not, in fact, ground to a halt. Back in 1989, social philosopher Francis Fukuyama made the extraordinary claim that because "the major alternatives to liberal democracy had exhausted themselves," history had effectively come to an end. Ten years later, he backpedaled by announcing that history wasn't at an end because science continued to make progress. Fukuyama picks up that thread in Our Posthuman Future: Consequences...