About a week ago I heard an interesting NPR article on stem cell news. They were discussing some recent discoveries/observations regarding what had previously been considered a scientific scandal. If you recall, a few years ago (in 2004) South Korean scientists claimed to have cloned a human embryo, and derived stem cells from the clone. That particular claim quickly turned out to have been faked, and they people responsible resigned in disgrace, but now scientists from Harvard working with cells obtained from the Koreans are now suggesting that they (the Koreans) were the first to produce embryonic stem cells using only egg cells. That process is called parthenogenesis, and it’s been possible for simpler animals (including vertebrates like frogs) for a long time. The Harvard guys had problems getting heard, because nobody wanted to consider anything to do with the South Korean data.
I think all of this is ironic in so many ways. First that the South Koreans did something historic, and may not have realized it because they were too busy faking data. Second that it was scientifically unfashionable to mention anything to do with them. Thirdly, and from my point of view most importantly is that this is one more step in the direction of making fundamentalist’s position even less logically tenable. The moral argument is that stem cell research harms embryo’s. That position got pretty weak earlier when it became possible to remove a cell from a blastocyst without harming it and form cloned stem cells, but the fundies recovered by asking “How can you be sure the embryo won’t be harmed in any way?”. If a human ovum can develop into an embryo without conception, how will the fundamentalists manage to define the beginning of life in such a way as to prevent research? When will the “soul” tiptoe into the petri dish? How will the lunatics know to attack living people to save the unborn? It’s almost, but not quite as good as being able to derive embryonic stem cells from adult stem cells.
As an aside, I see at least one site using human parthenogenesis as the explanation for the “virgin birth” of Jesus. This makes me chuckle, but I’ll have to think through why.
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