mberkley@watdcsu.UUCP (J.M.Berkley - Computing Services) (10/06/86)
This is a quote from Scientific American, Aug 1986. The article is "Transplantation in the Central Nervous System" by Alan Fine: "For the moment transplantation in the central nervous system of human beings poses an ethical problem.....Nerve cells derived from certain tumors can be grown in culture and have been transplanted successfully into rodents. The likeliest source of embryonic neurons for transplantation to human beings, however, appears to be tissue from aborted fetuses." The article reports on experiments being done to repair damaged nerves (including the spinal cord) of rats by using neural tissue from rat fetuses. The application in human beings is obvious: give mobility back to people with spinal cord injuries. The problem is that this makes human abortions into a factory process: use aborted babies as spare parts. How do people feel about this? The aborted fetus is a human baby. How can we allow a woman's body to be used in this way? Next thing they will be paying women to have abortions just as they pay for blood donors in some states. Mike Berkley mberkley@watdcsu.UUCP
marty1@houem.UUCP (M.BRILLIANT) (10/07/86)
In <2622@watdcsu.UUCP>, mberkley@watdcsu.UUCP (J.M.Berkley - Computing Services) wrote: >This is a quote from Scientific American, Aug 1986... > > .... The likeliest > source of embryonic neurons for transplantation to human > beings, however, appears to be tissue from aborted fetuses." > >.... The application in human beings is obvious: give >mobility back to people with spinal cord injuries. > >The problem is that this makes human abortions into a >factory process: use aborted babies as spare parts. > ... >The aborted fetus is a human baby. How can we allow a woman's body >to be used in this way? ... That's backwards. The woman presumably had an abortion because she _didn't_ want her "body to be used" to produce a baby. The use of the fetus for spare parts is a way to get some value from the lost fetus and "give mobility back to people with spinal cord injuries." > ... Next thing they will be paying women to have >abortions just as they pay for blood donors in some states. We are already paying women to have babies for other women who can't have babies. They do it voluntarily. The actual problems are not so much ethical as legal: is the surrogate-mother contract legally binding? If a woman doesn't want to bear a child, but wants to be paid to provide spare parts so that a person with a spinal cord injury can walk again, everybody gains -- provided the woman's own ethical principles don't tell her otherwise. M. B. Brilliant Marty AT&T-BL HO 3D-520 (201)-949-1858 Holmdel, NJ 07733 ihnp4!houem!marty1
trash@oliveb.UUCP (Tom Repa) (10/08/86)
in <2622@watdcsu.UUCP> Mike Berkley writes: > This is a quote from Scientific American, Aug 1986. The article is > "Transplantation in the Central Nervous System" by Alan Fine: > > "For the moment transplantation in the central nervous system > of human beings poses an ethical problem.....Nerve cells > derived from certain tumors can be grown in culture and have > been transplanted successfully into rodents. The likeliest > source of embryonic neurons for transplantation to human > beings, however, appears to be tissue from aborted fetuses." > > The article reports on experiments being done to repair damaged > nerves (including the spinal cord) of rats by using neural tissue > from rat fetuses. The application in human beings is obvious: give > mobility back to people with spinal cord injuries. > > The problem is that this makes human abortions into a > factory process: use aborted babies as spare parts. > > How do people feel about this? > > The aborted fetus is a human baby. How can we allow a woman's body > to be used in this way? Next thing they will be paying women to have > abortions just as they pay for blood donors in some states. > > Mike Berkley > mberkley@watdcsu.UUCP The aborted !baby is dead tissue, nothing else. It seems to me that this is about the same thing as giving your organs to medical research after your dead. "How can we allow a womans body to be used this way"?? Do you think women will be getting pregnant and getting abortions just to supply researchers? Or perhaps you're part of that paranoid crowd that thinks that abortionists 'lure' women into abortions for money? I think you'd have to pay a woman a lot to endergo an abortion. They're painful. Plus I think there are enough women (unfortunately) already undergoing abortions to take care of any possible need in this potential research field. And since the article stated that some of the tissue can be grown from tumors, I think it much more likely that this route would be taken by the researchers, if their research pans out and they start to work on human tissue, in order to lessen the ethical considerations. More to the point, the article is about rat brains, not !baby brains. There are orders of magnitudes of difference between rat-based neurological research and human nevous system grafting. Tom Repa(trash@oliven) -- Remember what the Doorknob said:"Feed your head." Path: {allegra,glacier,hplabs,ihnp4}!oliveb!oliven!trash
trash@oliveb.UUCP (Tom Repa) (10/09/86)
[ Aborted Fetuses - Aborted Fetuses - Aborted Fetuses ] No Line-Eater would eat that! ( %*( sick smiley) This morning I recieved mail from Mike Berkley about my response to his aborted !baby-spare parts article. He stated that I "misread my [his] article and you [I] drew false conclusions from the Scientific American article - if you [I] read it." Well lets take this point by point: 1) If I misread your article, I'm sorry. But I don't think I did. 2) I drew false conclusions from the S.A. article. How do you define a false conclusion? Logically incorrect or different from you conclusion? I _have_ read the article and I do disagree with your conclusions. The more complete quote would have been: "For the moment transplantation in the central nervous system of human beings poses an ethical problem. Should experimental procedures that are shown to be successful in imperfect animal models but are unproved in primates and that carry unknown but perhaps serious risks be used to treat patients with progressive and fatal disease? The issue warrants wider consideration than it has recieved so far. Further ethical questions will arise if experiments in primate models of human disease clearly establish the value of the procedures. Nerve cells derived from certain tumors can be grown in culture and have been transplanted successfully into rodents. The likeliest source of emryonic neurons for transplantation into human beings, however, appears to be tissue from aborted fetuses." This is the final paragraph of an excelent article on some current work in neuronal growth research. However, the reasons I disagree with Mikes conclusions are: A) The final paragraph clearly states that the researchers are aware of the ethical considerations. As such IF the research progresses to the point where human research is considered, I think the researchers will try to find other types of tissue to use in the procedures because: i) I believe most people would not like to have a "COMA"-like situartion with ?dead? bodies, !baby or otherwise, hanging around as spare parts. ii) Grants for this type of research maight be VERY hard to get if you have to say you need dead baby brains on your application. iii) Who would want a bunch of outraged fundumbmentalists bombing your lab? (Excuse me, my biases are showing (ZZZZZZIP!) Actually a LOT of people would probably be demonstrating against any lab doing much of this research.) B) Earlier in the article quite a lot of space is given to the fact that other types of tissue can be transplanted into the brain because of the fact that the brain is on the side of the blood-brain barrier that the immune system is not. This was discussed in the context of transplanting hormone-producing tissue in the brain of people with hormonal abnormalities so that the hormones may reach the rest of the body, but the immune system cannot destroy the hormone producing cells. Can anyone out there see any other implications of this? YES! In the same article (SA August '86 pg. 52 col. 3 3rd para ,near the end) the author states: "It was later learned that immunologic rejection of a graft in the central nervous system may not occur even when the donor and the host animal are genetically different. Indeed, transplants to the central nervous system can succeed between animals of different species, particularly when the host animal has been treated with an immunosuppressive drug like cyclosporin." This implies that fetal brain tissue OF OTHER SPECIES could be used. Maybe, maybe not. Plus, as genetic engineering continues to develop, perhaps we will be able to grow just brain cells, without anything else. Why assume that since we can't do it now we won't be able to then? 3) You shouldn't assume that I haven't read the article just because I disagreed with your conclusions. I did read the article but did not have it in front of me to do this yesterday. Next time, I will wait till I have the article in front of me before I post, that way I will keep traffic down by not having to post twice. 4) I don't know if this matters, but the article was not, I believe, written by any researcher but rather by a science writer. I believe this because nowhere in the article could I see a bio, commendations, current place of employment, funding information or any of the other things usually added to an authors name if it is original research. So I believe the article is an overview of current progress. Since the part about fetus embryos is stated in the last line of the article, with no references, I'm not sure how much faith (scary word) I put in it. So I think it is clear that other options are available. I also think that people doing research to help people in this way would be the type which are least likely to start a "production line" of dead fetuses. Call me a philanthrope, call me an optomist, but I just don't think it would happen. I see much more horror in the possibility that abortion becomes illegal, and thousands of women per year again die or become sterile through coat-hanger abortions. That's my viewpoint. Tom Repa (trash@oliven) -- But wise men never fall in Love, so how are they to know? Path: {allegra,glacier,hplabs,ihnp4}!oliveb!oliven!trash