If you don't want anyone to have your baby, don't leave a lock of hair lying around!

[RSherman]

Last edited Thu May 25, 2023, 09:13 AM - Edit history (1)

I just heard a story about IVG, its potential to help people have babies and its possible ethical complications.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5033438/

Researchers have been able to find cells anywhere on a mouse's body. In one instance, they used a cell from the end of the tail. They were able to produce healthy mice pups.

On the plus side, older women could have children. Same sex couples could have children from just their cells. A single person could produce a child from just that person's cells.

Ethical implications: more emphasis on designer babies. Someone obtaining hair or something else from a celebrity and using it for the necessary cells. Therefore, people's cells being used for pregnancy without their knowledge or consent.

[Ilsa]

1. I'm remembering The Boys from Brazil right now,

and wondering if someone preserved part of Hitler's body.

[zuul]

5. Yikes!

For some reason I have been thinking about that movie lately. I haven't seen it aired on network tv or premium channels in probably a decade. I wonder why it isn't being aired. The premium channels have been airing other old movies.

[Ilsa]

9. Good movie, especially with so many great actors. Steve Guttenberg

was so young then as a nazi-hunter.

I read the book, too. I found the (Mengele's?) attempted recreation of Hitler's youth to be a little preposterous. But overall it was suspenseful, dark, and as a late 70s movie, timely. I was too young to remember the importance of the Eichmann trial, but I knew a bit about Nazi history by the time the movie was released, thanks to, in part, movies like The Hiding Place, The Diary of Anne Frank, etc.

[claudette]

2. Sounds like

it would be an expensive thing to try. Hopefully it will never happen in humans.

[Jirel]

3. So what?

DNA is DNA. We’ll soon be at a point where it is of negligible effort to create a healthy clone, or just mix ‘n match in a test tube. None of which matters, and none of which impacts ethics, as long as the new life produced is free of genetic disease or intentionally life-threatening flaws. We are all related somewhere in our line.

[Croney]

4. I think that "so what" is my first reaction too.

[getagrip_already]

6. You don't own your dna....

If you see a doctor for treatment and they find something interesting in your dna, you can't stop them from using it for profit or research.

Courts have held that dna and tissue are property, and not your property once someone else has it.

Follow the money and you will find law and policy.

Paternity does have costs in this society however. Those costs are based upon a man having participated in the creation of the child though, so not sure how this new technology will impact that.

[Girard442]

7. But...but...but...if many of the cells in your body have DNA that could make a clone...

...according to the forced-birthers, wouldn't that mean that each of those cells is a human being, just like a fertilized egg?

[RSherman]

8. Good point!

[getagrip_already]

10. so by extention, every time you go to the bathroom....

You are aborting a baby!