Every Sperm Was Sacred.

Last year scientists at University of Newcastle created primitive sperm cells with female embryonic stem cells.


As you can imagine, that provoked some shrieeeking from fundamentalist religious right wing zygote zealots. "Oh no!!! Bay-beez without holy sperm from the Menz!!!"


This year, the same team, led by Karim Nayernia, Professor of Stem Cell Biology, has re-purposed the research so its focus does not send Pat Robertson and his acolytes into a full-metal testerical rightwingnutter melt-down. A news item from ABC news reassures its viewers:

... the technique would allow researchers to study how sperm develops and possibly help develop treatments for infertile men. ... More than a third of infertility cases, which affect 7.3 million people in the United States, can be attributed to the male partner, according to a 2002 National Survey of Family Growth from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. ... new research may provide a glimmer of hope that infertile men may one day be able to contribute to the gene pool.

Speaking of rightwingnutters called Pat*, Pat Buchanan had advice for the Palins regarding an outcast contributor to their family gene pool:

"Well, first, with regard to Levi, I think First Dude up there in Alaska, Todd Palin, ought to take Levi down to the creek and hold his head underwater until the thrashing stops." The whole 'Morning Joe' gang laughed pretty hard at Buchanan's joke ...

More on that stem cell research here.

* Thanks for catching that, J.A.Baker.

Wake up Maggie

... I think I got something to say to you
It's late September and I really should be back at school.
I know I keep you amused
but I feel I'm being used ...

Margaret Somerville - a cougar? Unlikely, though stranger things have happened. No, I suspect Maggie is a latex - errr, latent and likely self-suppressed dominatrix though that orientation breaks out when she launches in one of her predictable and tedious public floggings of public morality.

Dr Dawg, who can run epistemological circles around Somerville, nails her sanctimonious hide to the wall. Metaphorically, of course.

...while on the subject of public intellectuals, the Citizen graces us today with another incompetent column by Margaret Somerville, the popular self-anointed authority on bioethics from McGill who is fond of telling us how to live and what to think under the guise of ethical discussion. There is, in fact little real discussion in Somerville's writings: it's all moral claims and assertions.

This time she's on about stem cell research and the sacredness of the embryo. ... "We are all ex-embryos," she says, in her sloppy way. We are, of course, all pre-corpses, too. ... Somerville makes much of the potential of an embryo, its "becoming," and summons up that phantasm, "moral intuition," which she has referred to, in other columns, as the "yuck factor." But the same abstract argument of potential could be used about contraception, since sperm and ova are, at least potentially, joined. In fact one could trace a chain of potential back to the origins of life. A protozoan has the potential of evolving into a human being. Morally speaking, must the chain never be broken? How can it be avoided?

Frances Kissling has a much better understanding of these issues, in addition to being more rigorous and honest in her intellectual analysis.

Surely I'm not the only one scratching my head at Somerville's never-ending perorations and wondering what deep, dark private secrets she knows about selected gros fromages. It's certainly not her MASSIVE moral authority or intellect that keeps McGill officials in her thrall.

Poached Nuts on Research Menu, Hold the Eggs.

Back in July, we wrote about scientific ‘eggheads’ creating embryonic stem cells by using stimulated yet unfertilized ova, in Virgin Eggs Over Easy, Hold The Sperm. Meanwhile, a different group of scientists with something else on the brain have been playing around with mouse testicles. From the CBC story:

Stem cells found in men’s testicles could someday be used to grow organs and tissues needed to fight disease, researchers at the Weill Cornell Medical College in New York City have found. … Scientists obtained spermatogonial progenitor stem cells (SPCs), which generate the precursors to sperm and determine fertility, from mouse testicles.

Catholic clergy got hot under the collar about research that used stimulated ova, and made up their own (unscientific) claims that if these eggs grow for the first few days and then stop, according to Church doctrine that may mean that they’re actually “very short-lived human beings”.

So far, there has been complete silence from the Vatican regarding research on testicular cells. This may be explained by the dynamics of another process, uncovered in the course of conducting research on male mice.

… other researchers have shown that adult cells can be reprogrammed to acquire
stem-cell potential. However, this process, called “induced pluripotency”, has
resulted in a generation of multi-potent stem cells that carried an increased
risk of transforming into malignant cells.

Now, does that process not sound familiar …? Isn’t that the perfect metaphor for the vile entity known as the

Magisterium?

Magisterium is a technical ecclesiastical term in Roman Catholic Church referring to the teaching authority of the church. This authority is understood to be embodied in the episcopacy, which is the aggregation of the current bishops of the church, led by the Bishop of Rome (the Pope). According to Catholic doctrine, the Magisterium is able to teach or interpret the truths of the Faith, and it does so infallibly within the Sacred Magisterium. The task of interpreting the Word of God authentically has been entrusted solely to the Magisterium of the Church, that is, to the Pope and to the bishops in communion with him

The Magisterium, a proliferation of malignant cells that fetishizes the fetus and command blind obeisance. Sounds quite right to me.

Originally posted at Birth Pangs.

Virgin Eggs Over Easy, Hold The Sperm

Scientists say they have created embryonic stem cells by stimulating unfertilized ova. This could be the first step toward producing transplant tissue that’s genetically matched to the women who donated the eggs. The current debate around the use of stem cells from viable embryo has become legally, ethically and politically contentious.

Stem cell research could spare the lives of people suffering from ghastly degenerative and progressive diseases. Experiments would be conducted on human ova cells that have been started on their replication process, although lacking DNA and chromosomes from sperm. The mass of replicating embryonic cells is not the product of conventional or artificial conception, yet the Rev. Tad Pacholczyk of the National Catholic Bioethics Center in Philadelphia says:

“My view is that if these grow as organized embryos for the first few days and then arrest, they may just be very short-lived human beings,” he said. “One is very possibly dealing with a defective human being. And at a minimum, the benefit of the doubt should be given here, and these embryos should not be created for the purposes of destroying them.”

Doesn’t the above sound like a knee-jerk reaction, scientifically ill-informed at best, theocratic and doctrinaire at worst? “Very short-lived human beings“? What part of ‘no sperm used’ did he miss in the original research paper? His reasoning does not even follow the fallacious premise that the fetus-fetishizers promote in their abortion-criminalizing campaigns. Or perhaps his objection has more to do with the religious imperative that needs to control women’s reproductive organs and ensure that they are exclusively used for breeding?

But on another level, the Church Fathers may simply be cheesed off at the multitudes of life-creating and life-saving possibilities that ova promise. Especially since theological constraints ensure that clerics, from the Pope on down, must only shoot duds.

Source

Originally posted at Birth Pangs