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health advisory Hospital Doctor Yu 2007-11-8 19:09:36

and why?

what if your child had a disease that potentially might be cured because of stem cell research? would you be in favor of it then?

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we could do that but if we are trying to develop something for george bush then we would have to use donkey dna.

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Why not test penicillins on guinee pigs?

It's been proved some forms of human cancers can be 'cured' in if I remember, beagles. A good fewmillion pounds, years research and many deaths later, maybe we can cure the same in humans!

We are NOT alike enough! If it were you're child, you're mother, yorself, wouldn't you be a little reasured the research work was done on humans? It would probably be too late to work on your own unique physiology. But what use would results on a pig or a rat be? Oh yeah, I was bought up strict Catholic!

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cuz stem cells of monkeys or apes develop into organs or monkeys or apes. we have to use human embryos if we want to develop humans or human organs

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Stem cell research is also done with non-human embryos, for example, monkey embryos. The usefulness of human stem cells lies in their compatibility with the patient/recipient. Anything made by animal cells will be a xenograft (with all the resulting difficulties).

As a general rule, a lot of research on monkeys can be done with monkey embryos. But practical applications on humans will have to be done with human stem cells. As a matter of fact, the ideal setting would be to use stem cells from the SAME host (ie : baby is born, umbilical vein cells are kept frozen and then they are cultivated and transplanted to the same baby if it suffers from leukemia).

Speaking from first hand experience, rest assured: handling human specimens is so much trouble that real scientists would rather work with mice if they can (which they frequently can't).

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