Nope

AP: Experiments May Overcome Stem-Cell Qualms---

NEW YORK - Two new mouse experiments may show how to obtain human embryonic stem cells without ethical hurdles, a step that could allow federal funding for such research, scientists reported Sunday.

Currently, scientists must sacrifice human embryos to harvest such cells, which can form any tissue type and are seen as valuable for studying and treating illnesses like diabetes and Parkinson's disease.

Objections to the embryo destruction have led to a ban on federal funding for such work, which scientists say hampers research.

The new methods, detailed Sunday in the online edition of the journal Nature, seek to obtain the cells without destroying embryos.

The Coalition for the Advancement of Medical Research, which advocates federal funding of stem cell research, cautioned that despite the goal of avoiding ethical quandaries, the new approaches "will not sit well with many who oppose embryonic stem cell research."

An official with the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops said the two reported techniques still raise ethical objections, although a spokesman for a group of Roman Catholic bioethicists called one of them a step in the right direction.

In the standard method of harvesting stem cells, researchers wait five days or so after fertilization until the embryo has become a ball of up to 150 cells. They obtain stem cells from the interior of the ball, which destroys the embryo.

One of the new mouse studies borrowed a lab technique used in fertility clinics, called pre-implantation genetic diagnosis or PGD. It is used to screen embryos for genetic disorders.

In the study, researchers plucked a single cell from eight-cell mouse embryos, which were about two days old. While fertility clinics use such a cell for genetic testing, the researchers cultured the plucked cells and found that behaved like embryonic stem cells. The embryos, meanwhile, went on to produce mice.

The result suggests that when clinics do PGD, they could let the cell they remove divide into two, and use one resulting cell for genetic testing and the other to establish a stem cell line, said Robert Lanza of Advanced Cell Technology in Worcester, Mass., an author of the study.

But Richard Doerflinger, deputy director of pro-life activities for the Catholic bishops conference, said PGD itself is unethical. It poses a risk of harm and is mostly an effort "to select out genetically imperfect embryos," he said.

That's not good enough for me. Creating a human life merely to use it in such a way, regardless of whether or not it is destroyed, is still wrong. We should not create life, or some portion of it, in laboratories for scientific use, medicinal use, and then destroy or discard it. What does that say about us?

We are not God and we shouldn't try to be.