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Does Personhood Begin During Pregnancy?
Published in Christopher Kaczor, The Ethics of Abortion, 2023
Another view is that implantation in utero marks the moment when a human being becomes a person. The importance of implantation is linked to the issue of abortion (particularly very early chemical abortion), the fate of human embryos created through in vitro fertilization not implanted in the womb (“spare” human embryos), and to therapeutic cloning, so a word about cloning is in order. A distinction is sometimes drawn between therapeutic cloning and reproductive cloning. Therapeutic cloning creates a new human embryo with the same genome as the “parent” who is cloned but destroys this human embryo in research before it is implanted in a woman's uterus. Reproductive cloning creates a human embryo for the sake of implanting the embryo in a maternal womb to be born. (In fact, both forms of cloning are “reproductive” in that they both produce an embryonic human being.) So, if human personhood begins at implantation, and not before, then therapeutic cloning would be permissible even though it destroys a human embryo. US Senator Orrin Hatch expresses this view in its most popular form when he says that a human life worthy of respect begins “in a woman's womb, not a Petri dish.”
Exploitation and control of women's reproductive bodies
Published in Wendy A. Rogers, Jackie Leach Scully, Stacy M. Carter, Vikki A. Entwistle, Catherine Mills, The Routledge Handbook of Feminist Bioethics, 2022
Therapeutic cloning involves producing stem cells which can repair and replace damaged human tissue, and it depends on a suitable supply of human eggs. Biologists have observed that the mammalian egg can remodel and replicate chromosomes not only from a sperm head but also from a variety of other cells (Kiessling 2004). This property has been exploited in the process of somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT), which involves removing the nucleus from an egg and replacing it with the nucleus of a somatic cell. The egg is then stimulated with a shock to develop into an embryo, either for transfer to a uterus for further development (reproductive cloning), or for culture in vitro (therapeutic cloning).
Science of biotechnology – Recombinant DNA technology
Published in Ronald P. Evens, Biotechnology, 2020
Step 3 in rDNA technology involves cloning of the gene and expression of the protein by the gene in host cells. Cloning is the reproduction and multiplication of the new nonhuman cell containing a human gene in the plasmid in the cell; a group of the new cells that is reproduced is called a “clone.” Expression is the production of the target human protein by a nonhuman host cell containing the human gene. These processes require a vector for the DNA (genes), that is, plasmids, as discussed earlier, so that the gene can be carried into a host cell.
Culturing human pluripotent stem cells for regenerative medicine
Published in Expert Opinion on Biological Therapy, 2023
Hiroki Ozawa, Takuya Matsumoto, Masato Nakagawa
Furthermore, the single-cell cloning step is essential for hPSC manipulation. hPSCs are known to have different properties, such as differentiation ability in each clone. The fact that the properties of hiPSCs differ from clone to clone suggests that the somatic cell population from which they were reprogrammed may be heterogeneous. Alternatively, it could be that the characteristics of the cell changed during reprogramming. Hence, cloning must be performed at some point after reprogramming the somatic cells. Likewise, performing single-cell cloning after gene editing with CRISPR/Cas9 enables the isolation of hPSCs for disease modeling and establishing clinical cell lines. As cloning efficiency is directly related to CRISPR/Cas9 experimental performance, improving the productivity of single-cell culture must be considered.
Mice transgenic for human CTLA4-CD28 fusion gene show proliferation and transformation of ATLL-like and AITL-like T cells
Published in OncoImmunology, 2022
Gyu Jin Lee, Yukyung Jun, Yoon Kyung Jeon, Daekee Lee, Sanghyuk Lee, Jaesang Kim
The protocol for this study was approved by the Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee (IACUC) of Ewha Womans University. The murine lck distal promoter region from −3037 to +41 was PCR-amplified from the pw120 plasmid.8,9 This was ligated to a DNA fragment containing CTLA4-CD28 fusion gene-coding sequence with the HA epitope at the C-terminus. Further details of the cloning procedure are available upon request. Pronuclear injection was performed on FVB/NJ mice eggs, and a transgenic line was established based on genotyping results. The oligonucleotide primers used for confirmation of transgene and genotyping were the primers lck-F, lck-R and ctla4-R whose sequences are 5ʹ-CCTCCCTCAGTATGAGTAGAAGC-3ʹ, 5ʹ-CCGTCGTAGTCACCACCTG-3ʹ and 5ʹ-GCTTTGCAGAAGACAGGGATG-3ʹ respectively.
Anticipatory Governance and Foresight in Regulating for Uncertainty
Published in The American Journal of Bioethics, 2022
While the hypothesis is conceivable, Ankeny, Munsie, and Leach (2022) note there is equally good evidence to the suggest the iBlastoids could not possibly develop into an organism and the conditions needed to grow them to the primitive streak stage have not yet been defined. Even if those experiments could be achieved, the stem cell uncertainty principle dictates that a precise “determination of its developmental potential” (Askenasy and Nadir 2006, 489) will only ever be an estimated probabilistic calculation (Fagan 2013). Implanting an iBlastoid into a biological womb in an attempt to develop the structure into a functional organism might generate conclusive evidence to prove or disprove the hypothesis. However, if successful, that outcome would foreseeably amount to human cloning, which is illegal in most countries, including Australia, and morally repugnant to many.