A reader sent me this article.
A major research project is to be announced this week that will culminate in three years with the first transfusions into human volunteers of “synthetic” blood made from the stem cells of spare IVF embryos. It could help to save the lives of anyone from victims of traffic accidents to soldiers on a battlefield by revolutionising the vital blood transfusion services, which have to rely on a network of human donors to provide a constant supply of fresh blood.
So now we go with an unwilling human donor and kill them in the process.
But developing blood made from the cells of spare IVF embryos will raise difficult ethical issues for people not happy with the idea of destroying embryos to create stem cells. It also raises the intriguing philosophical question of whether the synthetic blood will have come from someone who never existed. In theory, just one embryo could meet the nation’s needs.
As far as intriguing philosophical arguments go – that one is rather lame. This just does not matter and if we ware able to do this ethically with adult stem cells it would just be no question at all. Plus the idea that just one human embryo, in theory, will do is silly. As if the very first human embryo they killed would be all they needed. Though even if only one person was to be killed it is still intrinsically evil.
Scientists in other countries, notably Sweden, France and Australia, are also known to be working on the development of synthetic blood from embryonic stem cells. And last year, a team from a US biotechnology company, Advanced Cell Technology, announced that it has been able to produce billions of functioning red blood cells from embryonic stem cells. But the US work had been held up because of funding problems dating back to the ban on embryonic stem cell work under the Bush administration. President Barack Obama has since reversed that policy.
Will the lies never end? Nothing prevented them legally from this research since the only ban was for federal funding. Advance Cell Technology as Wesley Smith has amply documented is a publicity seeking enterprise that uses press releases to raise venture capital and make claims that are often just made up.
3 comments
…it has been able to produce billions of functioning red blood cells…
That many? Wow. That’s, like, equivalent to a whole milliliter of blood.
I still can’t help being surprised that more pragmatic spirits haven’t prevailed in the stem cell debate. This seems almost as cost effective as the genetically modified chicken-things in that “KFC doesn’t serve chicken” urban legend.
Argh. Like this whole thing wasn’t vampiric enough, already. Like there aren’t any other processes being researched to produce blood or blood substitutes. Nope, we must have the blood of innocents or nothing.
It’s all about money and prestige. Think about, for example, the bajillioins of fundraisers for breast cancer when lung cancer kills more men and women than breast cancer does by far (even though its incidence is lower than that of breast cancer in women and prostate cancer in men). Embryonic stem cell research became a cause celeb. Adult stem cell research is less of a cause celeb, and so it receives fewer dollars and less attention. Things tend to change once research switches over to the big-pharm side of things. Then the focus is on mass marketability. That’s why drug companies would rather spend their efforts on chronic diseases of aging (hypertension, coronary artery disease, joint pain) than things that are scary but relatively few people have (lung cancer, etc).