Therapeutic Cloning for Leukimia and Cancer
The Origin of Obstacles to Progress in Medical Science:
When Flemish Scholar Andreas Vesalius published the first medical textbook on anatomy in 1543, he did so at great personal risk, owing to the strict prohibitions of the medieval Catholic Church against any posthumous dissection of the human body.
Partly for this reason, it would be almost another full century before William Harvey correctly outlined the human circulatory system (Hellemans & Bunch, 1988).
Throughout the twentieth century, the Church has continued to voice its strong opposition to some of the most beneficial developments of modern medical progress, such as organ donation, artificial insemination and, of course, contraception, even in the most impoverished regions of the world where thousands of infants die every single day from starvation caused by overpopulation. The most recent area of conflict between medical research and the Church concerns the countless beneficial potential applications of stem cell research and cloning technology for the treatment of human diseases such as Leukemia and other cancers.
The Therapeutic Potential of Cloning Technology for Leukemia and other Cancers:
Leukemia is a perfect example of a devastating human illness that could be readily treated with derivative applications of research that is the subject of much current controversy. In healthy human beings, blood cells are continually produced within the marrow of bones. Leukemia consists of several specific related cancerous illnesses of the white blood cells in which the acute forms destroy the normal mechanisms by which blood is produced in the marrow.
Generally, in Leukemia, defectively formed white blood cells completely overgrow the bone marrow, for which the only medical treatment is a bone marrow transplant from a healthy donor. The problem is, unless the marrow donor is genetically identical to the recipient, the normal autoimmune system will attack and destroy the newly transplanted bone marrow....
Experiments in the late nineteenth century on frogs provided the groundwork for cloning (McKinnell 9-10). The method used a decade ago for the successful nuclear transplantation in amphibians required that the egg be enucleated, which meant removing the maternal hereditary material contained in the egg nucleus. Other hereditary material contained in the nucleus from a body cell would then be placed in the enucleated egg, and the resulting clone would
(iii) in the United States, Brazil, Germany and France, humans have been receiving their own stem cells to re-grow heart muscle in the unforeseen incident of heart attack or injury. This was found to be successful in majority of the cases. (iv) in one more incident, the vision of 23 patients was restored after limbal adult stem cell transplants. This line of therapeutic care has assisted a lot of
Ethics of Human Cloning In 1971, Nobel Prize winning-scientist James Watson wrote an article warning about the growing possibility of a "clonal man." Because of both the moral and social dangers cloning posed to humankind, Watson called for a worldwide ban on any research leading to cloning technology (Watson 8). Until then, cloning had been largely relegated to the realm of science fiction. Scientific research concerning cloning and in vitro fertilization
However, unlike embryonic stem cell, adult stem cell cannot be as easily controlled. Conclusion Because of its complicated theory and controversy, many people do not know much about stem cell research. Some people do not even know that there are two different types of stem cells: embryonic stem cells and adult stem cells. While many people are still in favor of embryonic stem cell research, the alternative -- adult stem cells
In avoiding the current controversy on the morality of embryonic stem cell research, researchers and doctors have resorted to other options (Dobson 2004, National Review 2004). Substitutes like adult stem cells and somatic cell nuclear transfer from placental or umbilical cord stem cells of newborns. Adult stem cells, however, were found to be nearly not as malleable as human embryonic stem cells or those acquired through somatic cell nuclear
A pre-embryo is the fertilized cell that has not yet been planted into the human host. Once the pre-embryo is implanted into the female host, it is assumed that it will grow and develop into a human being. The pre-embryo is not the same as the embryo, it is simply the raw material. A national bioethics committee has been assigned the duty of exploring these issues and making recommendations that
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