Friends, it is absolutely crucial to understand what Somatic Cell Nuclear Transfer is, and what it isn’t. It is cloning; even supporters of SCNT say so, even if only they call it therapeutic (vs. reproductive) cloning.
Carefully read this from “California Stem Cell” (CSC), a company that apparently sells stem cells and host of complementary products to aid in ESCR and treatment.
Note their definition of SCNT on this “Education” page: a nucleus is injected into an oocyte (egg) in order to produce stem cells (paragraphs 2 and 4). While blastocyst is mentioned (paragraph 4), there’s no admission on this page that the result is an embryo. (To be fair, CSC mentions this on other pages on its site).
Look carefully at the last paragraph:
There’s a world of difference between reproductive cloning – the use of cloning technology to create a child – and therapeutic cloning, the transplanting of a patient’s own DNA into an unfertilized egg in order to grow stem cells that could cure devastating diseases. With therapeutic cloning, the blastocyst can never develop into a person, because there is no fertilization of the egg by sperm, no implantation in the uterus and no pregnancy.
I hope that our feminist friends don’t read that last sentence. Because, if I’ve read it correctly, it takes a sperm to be a person.
On another page on CSC’s site, note the haunting realization that IVF “discards” will not be enough to satiate the scientific beast. We’re going to need more and more embryos, more and more clones:
New cell lines created from fertility treatment discards as well as, in the future, new technologies such as iPS and SCNT, will expand the scope and practicality of treatments based on embryonic-type stem cell derivatives.
Welcome to California.
