To Clone a Savior Sibling

In the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) there is a row of large machines, approximately the same size as vending machines. The parents of very sick children are pleased to have access to these machines, for each one is a savior to a sick child. The Voltaire family’s new girl child, Candy, is sick. She is in renal failure. Her heart has two damaged, barely functioning ventricles. She would have been allowed to die if it were not for the machine. Inside the machine is her clone, called an eidete. Grown from her own cells, her eidete is in every respects a living girl, genetically identical to Candy though 9 months behind in development. But her eidete has been kept unconscious by powerful drugs and will continue to be kept unconscious for the rest of her life, until she (the eidete) either dies from surgery or is put to death with a pain-free form of euthanasia. The eidete’s only purpose in life is to grow organs to be transplanted into Candy. Once the heart and kidneys are developmentally ready, they will be removed from the eidete and transplanted into Candy. This will mean death for her eidete. Hopefully this will save Candy’s life. If it doesn’t, then the doctor’s plan to grow another clone from Candy and try again. If, later in her life, more vital organs fail, then the doctors will grow another clone of Candy and take vital organs as needed to restore Candy’s health.

Stem Cell Developments Obsolete Embryonic Stem Cell Research

Human stem cells are important because they can transform into other human cells and the hope is that they will be able to cure currently incurable diseases. Human embryonic stem cells require either the killing and harvesting of an naturally inseminated embryonic child, or harvesting ova from a woman to create (cloned or uncloned) human embryonic children in a test tube. In either case it reduces a human life to a crop to be grown and harvested.

Now the man who in 1997 cloned Dolly the sheep using the nuclear transfer method of cloning has abandoned cloning approaches to stem cell research.

Prof Wilmut, who works at Edinburgh University, believes a rival method pioneered in Japan has better potential for making human embryonic [stem] cells which can be used to grow a patient’s own cells and tissues for a vast range of treatments, from treating strokes to heart attacks and Parkinson’s […]

His inspiration comes from the research by Prof Shinya Yamanaka at Kyoto University, which suggests a way to create human embryo stem cells without the need for human eggs, which are in extremely short supply, and without the need to create and destroy human cloned embryos, which is bitterly opposed by the pro life movement.

Prof Yamanaka has shown in mice how to turn skin cells into what look like versatile stem cells potentially capable of overcoming the effects of disease.

This pioneering work to revert adult cells to an embryonic state has been reproduced by a team in America and Prof Yamanaka is, according to one British stem cell scientist, thought to have achieved the same feat in human cells.

This work has profound significance because it suggests that after a heart attack, for example, skin cells from a patient might one day be manipulated by adding a cocktail of small molecules to form muscle cells to repair damage to the heart, or brain cells to repair the effects of Parkinson’s. Because they are the patient’s own cells, they would not be rejected.

In theory, these reprogrammed cells could be converted into any of the 200 other type[s] in the body, even the collections of different cell types that make up tissues and, in the very long term, organs too. Prof Wilmut said it was “extremely exciting and astonishing” and that he now plans to do research in this area.

And Wilmut isn’t the only big cheese who thinks this way.

Britain’s new Nobel prize winner and pioneer of stem cell research, Sir Martin Evans of the Cardiff School of Biosciences, commented on the Japanese work: “This will be the long-term solution.”

h/t: Drudge

Trackposted to Blue Star Chronicles, Nuke’s, The Pink Flamingo, A Blog For All, Dumb Ox Daily News, and The World According to Carl, thanks to Linkfest Haven Deluxe.

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