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Jo Ann Coen wrote: > > There was an article in this morning's Houston Chronicle about a child > who had a fatal blood disease, and could only be saved by a stem cell > implant (I'm paraphrasing). An embryo was grown in a culture by using > the egg and sperm of her father and mother. The embryo was implanted in > the mother and a piece of the embryo was > used to grow a stem cell. The little girl had her transplant, and so far > is doing well. The mother had a new baby boy, whom she named Adam. So > you can see, embryos do not have to be "killed", to achieve stem cells. > Jo Ann from Houston yes-- one part of an embryo became a child, the other was used for stem cell therapy of some sort, but that part could have become the twin to Adam Adam II or Adam III or Adam IV or Adam V etc... it still had potential to become a human and potential is what it is all about in the early stage of growth, the embryonic cell mass (16 cells or so) (not too many divisions--or differentiation starts to happen) can be sub-divided with chemical or mechanical dissociation... like subculturing a tissue culture flask (petri dish, whatever) the university of minnesota was doing that with cows years ago (i'm vague on exactly when, but, i read about it) to produce an entire herd of identical cows. the advantage of that is that a lot of variables are eliminated between individually unique cows. if milk production is different between identical cloned (twin like) cows --then it is because of what you did to it,(like the way it was fed) not because one is built genetically better (or worse) for milk production than another. when it comes to humans-- we need to question the potential of the technique. when is it used responsibly, for a MEDICAL NEED, and at what point is it not necessary. would we clone multiple copies of albert einstein, mozart or hitler, or... me.........if i needed some spare parts and --heck-- you don't even need moms and dads some gay partners could even have artificially produced offspring dads and dads or moms and moms and you don't even need couples with somatic cell cloning you'll just get a younger you a little twin sci-fi is here now actually its been around a while we're just gettibg good enough at it in animals to really consider the potential in humans once again i've rambled on to long only scratching the surface repression (senator brownback) won't make it go away research in animals will go on ray strand on the edge of the prairie abyss......................