Stem Cells, Cloning, and Abortion: Making Careful Distinctions

Stem cells, cloning, and abortion: making careful distinctions.

Embryonic discourse: abortion, stem cells and cloning.

This Article interprets the debate about abortion and the debate about embryonic research and therapeutic cloning as aspects of a larger history of ideas. The Article suggests that embryos increasingly stand for different truths in discourse about abortion on the one-hand and about embryonic stem cell research and therapeutic cloning on the other. More specifically, the Article suggests that th...

Cloning, Stem Cells and Ethics

With the arrival of Dolly the sheep, came the first full-blown cloning of an adult mammal, in which the nucleus of an adult cell was transferred to an empty egg cell, jolted with an electric shock to initiate embryonic development, and subsequently implanted in another ewe, to eventually be born as Dolly. The remarkable message of Dolly is that advanced, or differentiated cells, that is cells a...

Recipes for making human interneurons from stem cells require multiple factors, careful timing, and long maturation periods.

Commentary Regenerative medicine, and in particular stem cells, bring the promise of curing diseases by providing replacements for worn-out or defective tissue and organs. For many epilepsies, the GABAergic inhibitory interneurons are either in too short supply or do not function properly. Thus, the balance of excit-atory to inhibitory neurotransmission is tipped to overloaded excitation and ru...

Human embryonic stem cells and therapeutic cloning.

The remarkable potential of embryonic stem (ES) cells is their ability to develop into many different cell types. ES cells make it possible to treat patients by transplanting specialized healthy cells derived from them to repair damaged and diseased cells or tissues, known as "stem cell therapy". However, the issue of immunocompatibility is one of considerable significance in ES cell transplant...