Virgin Conception: The Roslin Institute

The Roslin Institute, infamous for their sucessful cloning "Dolly the Sheep", have figured out a way to make a human embroyo without the addition of any genetic material from a male sperm cell.

The scientists stress the embryos would never be implanted in a woman's womb - and the terms of their research licence prohibit this anyway.

Human embryos created using a so-called "virgin conception" technique have been made in the UK for the first time.

The Roslin Institute, which also cloned Dolly the sheep, reported the so-called parthenotes at a Dublin conference.

They are made by stimulating a human egg to start dividing like an embryo without the addition of any genetic material from a male sperm cell.

The Edinburgh team has so far created six parthenotes to the stage at which they would hope to mine stem cells.

"At the moment we have not managed to get stem cells from these embryos but that continues to be our ambition," Roslin's Dr Paul De Sousa told the British Association's Festival of Science in the Irish capital.

news.bbc.co.uk...

Now this all kind of bothers me. Sure, right now it may be for "research".. but what's going to happen once this whole practice becomes "comfortable" to the public? Are we going to have father-less children? (Literally)..

Will the first child "created" this way be dubbed a 'Jesus'?

-QS

Heap another religiously unacceptable practice into the bin.

If no new genetic material is presented, wouldnt it be just half of the mothers genetic material, and thus not able to grow into a functioning organism?

i wonder if is strange that the Roslin Institute are the first ones to do this, if true. they were also the first with dolly the sheep as well.

What is the whole point here? "Fatherless children" well I am no afraid of it as a women.

But the ones to be "Afraid very Afraid" are the male species.

Because you are about to be rendered "OBSOLETE"

Just joking guys

Actually, it just means one less thing we need to do around the house.

Anyone would be FOOLISH not to see where this will end up in say.. oh 10-15 years.

We as humanity have proven time and again that if there is a moral line to be drawn, we will draw it... but with invisable ink.

Peace

They specify in the article that the embryo are being cultured in such a way as to retain a full complement of the original genes, so if allowed to grow, this should result in a clone of the donor. Sounds like they're hoping only use the method to harvest cells, though.

I'm not sure why this is newsworthy. This only allows you manufacture stem cells for women, and only those who are still menstruating. Far more useful methods have existed for a while.

For instance: content.nejm.org...

That's fantastic!

Think about it. First off, that's gotta be hard to. Really hard. And if they did it, well, it's a sign we're getting places. Any advancement, any practice with the technology, is helpful elsewhere with this stuff. Second, they'll never test this on a human, but if they could duplicate it with animals, then they could really test it and see how it works.

This isn't an attempt to eliminate men; it'd fail. Every woman has to live with themself, why would they want to live with another one of them (daughter) and another (mother) and another (grandmother) and another (aunt) and another (sister) and so on. Please. This is just a good test of a good technology. You could, however, use it to help grow organs for women who have the money and would like a spare liver/heart/lung/kidney and would rather have one of their *own*.

It sounds like the only use for this technique would be to create stem cells without the use of a dead embryo.

Since its not a real human, they would use it as a stem cell culture. Free stem cells without the pictures of dead babies, we all win.

Man/Woman.... perhaps its neither. Perhaps this technology evolves into an "asexual, unisex" whatever you want to call it type "being".

I have posted in the past that perhaps "aliens" are us evolved far into the future travling back... the point is this. Arent most "accounts" regarding aliens, describe them as "sexually ambigious" or lacking in a gender... you get the idea.

Perhaps it begins now...

Technology is great.. except when driven by ego...

Peace


[edit on 13-9-2005 by Serum39]