From: Robert J. Bradbury (bradbury@aeiveos.com)
Date: Thu May 01 2003 - 17:46:53 MDT
Well, it makes sense since its a "natural" process.
But the fact that they managed to do it in the lab
is going to make the bioethics issues all that much
more complicated:
(Its on http://news.google.com/ under the Health section if the URL gets
broken.)
Also of interest -- this week's Nature has a report on how bone
marrow stem cells manage to turn into liver cells... apparently
after the reseed the blood system, some of them, perhaps macrophages
actually fuse with liver cells -- some of them can even undergo
chromosome reduction division so you end up with a cell with
a normal complement of chromosomes but with some of the chromosomes
(particularly those with genes that may be mutated in the recipient)
replaced with those from the donor bone marrow cells.
Pretty slick...
In case the stem cell into eggs trick isn't clear -- stem cell
into egg cells + sperm --> makes more stem cells --> makes
more eggs and so on and so forth...
Robert
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