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Monday, August 28, 2006

Bait and Switch

"In lab rats, "Who's your daddy?" can now yield a surprising answer. Scientists have generated rats from mice that developed rat sperm.The breakthrough marks the first time researchers produced healthy offspring [Photo] from sperm cells fostered in a different species. The hope is this method could help generate sperm from endangered species or prize bulls."

So begins the article on Live Science. But, given how hard it is to get ova from women, my money is that science uses the new technique to generate an enormous number of human gametes without the need for donor permission. The beauty is, they can use aborted female babies to get the egg-producers, and thus won't technically need anyone's permission. They'll use the resulting embryos for stem cell research to prove technique, then throw everything and everyone away at the end so the gene pool isn't contaminated.

I give them no more than five years.

1 comment:

Patrick said...

I actually read that something similar is already being experimented with. They are using eggs from other mammals and adding human DNA to see if they get a viable embryo (which of course is disposed of before the 8th cell division). Modern scientists look more and more like monkeys with guns.