Draft of Project 1

This blog post will contain the text to my podcast. I came down with strep this week so I lost my voice and was unable to do any audio recordings. I plan on doing the recording early next week when my voice returns to normal. This should give some time for my peers to leave any comments they may have. For now, I will babe attaching the draft of my script for my podcast. It is more informal than an actual paper because I will be saying these words.


*When you think about the stem-cell debate you are usually thinking about the debate on whether the  extraction of stem cells from a human fetus, post abortion, is ethical. This tied with the whole "Is abortion murder?" and "When does a fetus become a human?." This is not the debate I will be talking about for the length of this podcast. That debate has faded away since stem cells no longer need to be extracted from an aborted fetus.

The new debate for stem cells which has been happening over the past few years, is whether or not we should be mixing human stem cells with animals. In an article published by Discovery News in January of this year, scientist have discovered a way to grow human organs by using animals. With over 100,000 people on the wait-list for organs this could potentially expedite the process of waiting for an organ. The scientists, genetically modify the genes of animal embryos to be missing a certain organ and then inject that embryo with human stem cells in an attempt to get the stem cells to grow into a human organ inside the animal. The organ would then be later extracted and given to donor. The problem with this is that people are afraid that the animals could develop a human conscious and do not like the idea of scientist creating part animal part human creations.

This is a relatively new story to a debate that has been raging on whether we should be mixing human cells and animal cells in general. Already, due to stem cells, there are cows that can secrete human breast milk, there are rats with human cells in their brains which have shown to be smarter than normal rats, and their are also sheep with half sheep half human livers.

In response to the uncertainty of the science behind mixing stem cells and animal cells, the National Institute of Health has said it will not fund any research dealing with this type of science until it can further look into the ethics and science behind this research. Seeing as how the NIH have millions of dollars at their disposal, this cut to funding has upset many stem cell researchers who are a big stakeholder in this debate.

One of these research labs is located at Stanford University. Once you enter Stanford University you will walk down a long road. At the end of this road is a tall stone building called Hoover Tower. There, on a warm fall evening, you will always find students sitting under the beautiful multi-colored trees studying or just socializing. Pine trees are also in abundance and their fragrance becomes very noticeable the closer you get to them.

The loud cheers from the crowd and the rumbling of the stage can be heard for blocks around the stadium. Also, Stanford has a beautiful sunset to the backdrop of the pine trees and old buildings. Often times during the late evening you will see students sitting in the grass or going on top of one of the buildings and watching the sun set. 

Around campus, there are also plenty of elaborately designed fountains that students often sit at.  There are also a lot of small shops where you can by an assortment of things from. The buildings themselves have an old fashion look to them which draws a lot of tourist attraction.

Located here is the research lab of Hiromitsu Nakauchi.

Hiromitsu Nakauchi is a short Japanese man with glasses. He has a soft spoken and kind mannerism. He still has a thick amount of hair on the side of his head but is clearly going bald down the middle. He is clean shaven with relatively few wrinkles and dimples on his cheek. There is no feature on his face that stands out as bigger or smaller than average. Being raised in Japan he naturally has Japanese accent.

Hiromitsu believes that "we should be able to pig with human organs" in previous work he mixed the genes of rats and mice to create half rat half mice animals so he has no doubts that they will be able to create animals with complete human organs.

However, people do not like the ethics behind this. Many animal rights activists are worried about the lives of such animals that have human organs in them. They are also worried about the idea of these animals developing a human intelligence. Since a lot of this science has never been done before the exact results are unknown which ties back to the reason the NIH cut funding.

In particular Michael Synder, a reporter for info wars, vehemently apposes such science. He believes we are opening a Pandora's Box to a whole new array of diseases. He believes these experiments are unnecessary risks and will create problems that scientists will not know how to solve. States like Arizona

Pablo Ross, a researcher at UC Davis who's labs handle a lot of the human/animal mix partially agrees with Michael Synder but says that their are already measures in place to avoid some of these problems. In particular, they don't let the chimeras, another name for the human/animal mix, they don't let them grow past a certain state as to avoid some of the controversy. He also says that they don't expect the embryos to develop human characteristics but they also can not rule it out since the experiment has never been done before."



So what side do you take? Do you believe this type of science could benefit the human race so it should continue? Or do you believe it is to risky and there is to much unknown and should be stopped? *