Anchoress, though it sounds a little bit too “mystical” to me, I think you might be on to something. What if embryonic stem cells are intended to be as close to perfection as possible? Before Death entered creation, through Adam and Eve, if we assume that not even the cells of our bodies died, they must have had amazing regeneration properties… Makes you think…

Donna, color me “conspiracy-theorist blue”, but I think there are certain organizations that actually try to use more embryonic stem cells than they need to, in order to create a “demand” for them. And, of course, for pro-lifers like me, I can see where they are going with this… I seem to recall an article a year-or-two ago, where the claim was made that certain research scientists were using human embryonic stem cells in situations that made more scientific sense to use other animal cells. The author did not push the political issues, but it certainly left me with a distinct impression…

Gaius, I don’t think it was odd that they killed the animals if they needed to be able to look at the make-up of the cells as close as possible to the moment of their transisting themselves in a bizarre way. I guess I would ask how many test animals were there and whether they needed to see if the same or different transformation/mutation was present in each animal that exhibited the strange growth. Also, I would guess that this experiment will be repeated as often as possible, to answer even more questiong, subject to stem cell line availability. My question is, why did they not use rat embryonic stems cells in the rat experiments?

The whole point of stem cells is that they’re plenipotent — they can turn into many other kinds of cells as they develop. And the whole reason embryonic stem cells are the ones seized upon by the imaginations of the ignorant is that they’re the most general form. Other types of stem cells have already developed enough to close off some possibilities for later growth.

In any complex mechanism, there’s only one way for it to work right and many many ways for it to go wrong. Cells are about as complex a mechanism as there is. Cancer is cells with bad regulatory systems, i.e. something went wrong. The mystery is not that cells become cancerous. The mystery is that sometimes they don’t.

Regards,
Ric

I have a theory about these embryonic stem cells…I think they’re humanity in its purest form – very close to its divine origins…like uncut heroin, they’re just too powerful and too unpredictable for our clumsy uses. But what do I know?