Does Personhood Begin During Pregnancy?
Christopher Kaczor in 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.”
Methods of Evaluation in Orthopaedic Animal Research
Yuehuei H. An, Richard J. Friedman in Animal Models in Orthopaedic Research, 2020
The basic terminology given here is adapted from the reviews by Shore and Kaplan.251,252 A gene is a unit of heredity, consisting of a segment of chromosomal DNA that is required for production of a functional protein or RNA. The gene contains both coding and regulatory regions. A transgene is a foreign gene which has been spliced into an animals original genomic DNA. mRNA is a type of RNA that contains protein coding information. Nucleotide sequence refers to the order of nucleotides in a given segment of DNA or RNA. Translocation is the transfer of a portion of DNA from one chromosome to another. A probe is a DNA or RNA molecule that is labeled, or tagged, and can then be used to locate a complementary DNA or RNA strand through hybridization. Vectors are DNA molecules that are used as carrier molecules for cloned DNA sequences. They contain information which allows recombinant molecules to be replicated in host bacterial cells. A plasmid is a small circular double-stranded DNA molecule which is found in bacteria and replicates independently of the host chromosome. They are commonly used as vectors in molecular cloning. A recombinant DNA molecule is a DNA molecule containing segments of DNA from different origins, such as a piece of human DNA that has been joined to a plasmid DNA. A clone is a term used to describe identical segmental DNA molecules produced by recombinant DNA technique. Molecular cloning is a process by which a specific segment of DNA is isolated and then numerous identical copies, or clones, of that segment of DNA are generated.
Reproductive Choice and Advancing Technologies
Robert M. Veatch, Laura K. Guidry-Grimes in The Basics of Bioethics, 2019
The newest birth technology to capture the public fascination is cloning (Haugen et al., 2009; Lauritzen, 2001; President’s Council on Bioethics, 2002; UNESCO, 2009). Cloning is the asexual reproduction of an organism by taking the nucleus along with its chromosomal material from a cell of an existing creature and implanting it into an enucleated egg cell or other cell of another creature. Although currently cloning is limited to research and possible generation of new tissues and organs (such as in the case of spinal cord injury), the modified cell, once charged by an electric shock, has the potential to grow and develop into a new being. The resulting creature, barring mutations, will be a genetically identical copy of the original one, a being who has pre-existed it by a significant amount of time. It is like an identical twin, but with the critical difference that the clone can observe its biological future insofar as it is genetically determined.
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
Tamra Lysaght
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.