Michael West is talking about cells that can become any type of cell and that don’t die. He’s showing photos of nerves, folllicles, heart muscle and much more, all made in the lab.

The cells W authorized for NIH funding would all be rejected by foreign bodies, i.e., you and me. Michael’s proposing therapeutic cloning, i.e., taking a cell from the body and making it young and embryonic again, and then making what the patient needs. (This is different, obviously, from reproductive cloning.) He shows footage of a cell being cloned: it looks way simple and mechanical.

By introducing young, cloned cells into the body, there’s data that they start to reline our aging arteries. And they can be targeted to kill the tumors that attract them. And we’ve now injected cells into a heart after it had a heart attack; the cells relined the thinning heart muscle with new tissue.

He talks about using “search and replace” to alter a DNA sequence. Someone in the audience asks if there’s spellcheck.

Whitfield Diffie asks what will happen when a lesbian couple clones a baby, “thus proving that men are dispensible.”

Someone from the audience says that Jews don’t resist stem cell research “Because in our tradition, a fetus is a fetus is a fetus … and then it becomes a lawyer.”

Excellent presentation. Much more info than I’ve captured. Quiet passion.

Categories: misc dw