So, now it seems that a virgin could indeed bear child, which all these years was taken as a sign of the insanity of religious belief. Perhaps what we call mythology is simply science ahead of its time:
“Fertility specialists have found a way for women to have babies without men.
It involves a cocktail of chemicals acting as an ‘artificial sperm’ to trick a human egg into forming an embryo.The stunning discovery has alarmed medical ethics campaigners, who described it as turning nature on its head. Researchers say the groundbreaking technology could be used to help women whose husbands are infertile but who do not want to use donor sperm.
Any babies born from the process would be female and genetically identical to their mother.
The news also creates a legal minefield for UK authorities which govern fertility treatments, because British laws do not cover the creation of an embryo without sperm. The discovery was made by researchers from the Institute for Reproductive Medicine and Genetics in Los Angeles.
They were investigating new ways of genetically modifying embryos to grow into brain nerve cells, in order to give transplants to patients with Parkinson’s Disease. Their experiments with mice triggered a form of asexual reproduction called parthenogenisis, which until now has happened only in creatures such as insects and frogs.
In normal human reproduction, an egg carrying 23 pairs of chromosomes, the building blocks of life, is fertilised by a sperm, which also carries 23 sets.
This crucial binding, creating 46 pairs of chromosomes, opens the way for cell division, the very beginning of human life.
But researchers Dr Jerry Hall and Dr Yan-Ling Feng managed to make eggs duplicate their own chromosomes to create the number needed to start cell division.
Several embryos were transferred to mouse ‘foster mothers’ where they developed successfully before being destroyed after 13 days.
Though the process has yet to be tested on human eggs, studies have already shown that they behave in a similar way to those of mice. The findings are due to be unveiled today at the annual meeting of the respected American Society of Reproductive Medicine in Florida.
They have been hailed as a new way of producing different kinds of cells for medical use.
Dr Michael Soules, president of the ASRM, said: ‘If this works with human eggs, there could be tremendous opportunities for clinical applications. I think everyone is going to find this work to be very exciting.’
But Dr Jacqueline Laing, expert in medical ethics from London’s Guild Hall University, said last night: ‘This is alarming. Just because scientists can do something, it does not mean that they should.
‘This process does not respect human life, in seeking either to procreate without the male or to use human eggs to turn them into some other part of the body for transplants.
‘It doesn’t respect reproduction and ordinary relations between men and women and the natural functions we have to protect human beings from arbitary creation. What are we expecting that any children born of this process will feel? If we go down this avenue, what else will be permissible?’
Paul Tully, of the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children, said: ‘Parthenogenisis is akin to cloning in a sense. It is the way lower orders of animals such as frogs and insects are able to reproduce.
‘It is entirely unknown for this to happen in humans and this is a very disturbing discovery. Apart from the ethical concerns of what was happening to these embryos without their consent, it could mean that, theoretically, it would be possible to eradicate men.’
He added: ‘What we are seeing here is the technological imperative – they are doing it just because they can. Is society going to curb this or are we going to see even more outlandish discoveries?
‘My fear is that, as with cloning, there will be horrific developmental abnormalities and accelerated ageing of these embryos. One dreads to think what they may suffer in the name of science.’
The Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority, which governs IVF research in Britain, said a new law on parthenogenic embryos may be needed.
A spokesman said: ‘The view would probably be that no research could be carried out without permission and it certainly would not be licensed for clinical use unless it was proven safe and there were no ethical concerns.’Taken to its extreme, it could lead to the science fiction nightmare of a female-dominated society where men have little or no role.“
Comment:
Yes, that last line comes with no irony alert at all. As for creating laws to stop technology, good luck with that.
Tabloid in Action Lila.
Here is the orignal report in the NYT
New Work May Provide Stem Cells While Taking Baby From Equation
Published: November 6, 2001
LOS ANGELES, Nov. 5— In a development that may sidestep some of the ethical issues surrounding stem cell research, a scientist here says he has created stem cells that can turn into nerve cells using a kind of embryo that cannot develop into a baby.
The work, done in mice, is one of several recent experiments that explore the usefulness of asexual reproduction in deriving stem cells.
The researcher, Dr. Jerry L. Hall, uses chemicals to coax an egg to grow into an embryo of sorts without being fertilized by a male’s sperm. Such embryos, even if implanted into a womb, would not grow to become viable babies, Dr. Hall and other experts said. But the embryos can be grown in a laboratory for a few days, long enough to become a source of stem cells.
Embryonic stem cells can turn into virtually all types of the body’s cells, potentially providing replacement cells that can be transplanted into patients to cure diseases. But opponents say such research is immoral because deriving stem cells involves destroying embryos, which they see as nascent human life.
Dr. Hall argues that if an ”embryo” were not formed by conception and would not be able to turn into a child, that might make stem cell work more acceptable.
”We feel that this really could circumvent a lot of ethical concerns,” said Dr. Hall, an embryologist at the Institute for Reproductive Medicine and Genetic Testing, a fertility clinic here. He presented his work at the annual meeting of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine in Orlando, Fla., late last month.
But Richard M. Doerflinger of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, said the technique was unlikely to end the opposition the Roman Catholic Church has to embryonic stem cell work.
The real question, he said, is whether these are really embryos. If they are, ”the fact that these beings would not survive to birth does not answer the question,” he said. ”Our teaching about the embryo does not rely on it having been created by fertilization.”
Numerous scientific questions remain as well about the work, which has not been published in a scientific journal. Dr. Hall, who did the research with Dr. Yan-Ling Feng of the Center for Reproductive Research and Testing in Rockville, Md., said they had not determined whether the stem cells could turn into other types of cells, or even whether the nerve cells were normal.
Dr. Hall said he had not yet tried to derive human stem cells this way. But others are getting closer to that. The University of Massachusetts has applied for a patent on using the technique to derive stem cells from primates, including humans. The work was done with Advanced Cell Technology, a stem cell and cloning company in Worcester, Mass.
Scientists at the university and the company derived a line of stem cells from monkeys that could be maintained for months and that spontaneously differentiated into many types of cells including beating heart cells, according to the patent application, which has been published in Europe but not yet granted.
Dr. Michael West, chief executive of Advanced Cell Technology, would not comment when asked if the company had tried this in humans. He also would not discuss the company’s work in detail, saying he did not want to jeopardize an upcoming publication in a scientific journal.
The work takes advantage of a phenomenon known as parthenogenesis. It is known that some species of flowers, insects, lizards and snakes can reproduce asexually, with the female’s egg growing into a baby without being fertilized by a male..
Parthenogenesis, which is from the Greek for virgin birth, does not occur naturally in mammals. But for decades scientists have known how to trick the eggs of mice, rabbits and other mammals into developing as if they had been fertilized by subjecting the eggs to various chemicals or to temperature changes, needle pricks or electrical shocks. The resulting embryos are called parthenotes. It has not been reported that this has ever been done with human eggs, however, and it would raise ethical questions.
An egg has a full number of chromosomes right up until fertilization, when it ejects half of them and receives a half set from the sperm. So if this ejection is suppressed, an egg will have the full number of chromosomes.
The embryos created this way would not be clones of the woman, Dr. Hall said, because the chromosomes in an egg are somewhat different from the woman’s set. Still, he said, the tissues derived from stem cells from such embryos would be close enough to a woman’s own tissues that they would not be rejected if transplanted back into the woman.
Another possible way to develop such compatible tissues is to use stem cells made by cloning the patient’s own cells. The idea, known as therapeutic cloning, is to take genetic material from a patient’s cell and fuse it with an egg that is missing its own nucleus, creating an embryo that is a genetic copy of the patient. But because an embryo made through that method would in theory be able to develop into a person, Roman Catholic authorities and other abortion opponents have objected.
To create the parthenotes, Dr. Hall and Dr. Feng bathed the mouse egg cells in alcohol and then exposed them to a chemical called cytochalasin D. About 30 percent of the eggs were activated and 40 percent of those went on to form a blastocyst, a several-day-old embryo from which stem cells can be taken. The stem cells were treated with retinoic acid to turn them into nerve cells.
Dr. Azim Surani, a professor of biology at Cambridge University, said the work was not surprising since he and others had derived parthenogenetic stem cells more than a decade ago and saw evidence that they would turn into nerve cells. But he said it was unclear how many other types of cells could be created this way. ”They don’t form muscle cells very easily,” he said.
Dr. Surani also said the parthenotes and any tissues derived from them might be abnormal. That is because in normal embryo development, certain genes from the father but not the mother, or vice versa, are turned on. But parthenotes don’t have genes from the father, so this process, called imprinting, would go awry. Lack of imprinting is also probably the reason that parthenotes do not develop into babies, he said.
Still, Dr. West said it might be possible one day to produce human babies through parthenogenesis. Male parthenotes could be created, too, he said, by replacing the DNA in an egg with the DNA from two of a male’s sperm cells.
But male and female parthenotes have shown differences, said Dr. Jose Cibelli, vice president for research at Advanced Cell Technology. Stem cells derived from male par thenotes tend to turn into muscle cells, while stem cells from female parthenotes turned more often into brain and nerve cells, he said.
Dr. West said that if this process could be used to produce live offspring it would open up vast new reproductive possibilities. A woman could give birth by herself. Or two men may be able to each contribute one sperm to have a baby together.
Photo: Dr. Jerry L. Hall said ethical concerns raised by stem cell research might be circumvented by using a kind of embryo from an unfertilized egg. (Jill Connelly for The New York Times)
Oh dear, I’m disappointed. But I actually think the Daily Mail isn’t that far off.
http://www.businessinsider.com/could-virginal-birth-be-possible-in-the-future-2013-11
http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature/19555550
http://io9.com/5958680/chemistry-can-induce-virgin-birth-in-animals
http://dailycristo.com/science/scientists-establish-virgin-births/
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/discoblog/2009/01/09/the-science-of-virgin-birth/
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/80beats/2008/10/10/female-shark-gets-pregnant-on-her-own-no-male-required/
Well, science or science fiction?
Until it becomes empirical science, it remains science fiction. You said so yourself: “”
That is not the issue here Lila. It is customary to pass science fition, and fiction, off as science today when it serves the propaganda agenda. We see that across the board with fabrications pretending to be science. It is in Climate change, it is in global warming, in no less a measure than it is in 9/11 being the work of OBL or the financial collapse is due to natural business boom-burst cycle or short-sighted greed or blind sight of financial institutions, etc. etc. Both of us know better.
I looked at your links. I fear that this is also what is transpiring on this topic. It serves the agenda of Secular humanism well, and many useful idiots in the scientific community contribute to the “science” of it just as they do to the science of global warming…. Not all of them are necessarily mercenary. Your first link for instance quotes Marisa Bartolomei:
‘For parthenogenesis to occur, many of these changes would have to occur through random mutation. “I just think it’s too complex and you’d need too many things to happen accidentally,” says Marisa Bartolomei, a molecular geneticist at the University of Pennsylvania.
While highly unlikely, it’s still theoretically possible that scientists could one day induce the necessary changes in the lab. “Is there a mutation that could eliminate all imprinting, so we would see that we didn’t need Dad or Mom in order to have normal development?” Bartolomei asks. “This is a question that people have asked a lot, and we don’t know the answer.”‘
All the articles are similar. There is no scientific data in them anymore than there is in the Daily tabloid you initially quoted from. The real science is in the actual research reported in the NYT and what they say is what they have empriically noted. And they do no speculate idly on any of the stuff that tabloids are made of. What everyone else is evidently saying is IDLE speculation. Even there, as in the Bartolemi’s case, note what she is actually saying:
‘For parthenogenesis to occur, many of these changes would have to occur through random mutation. “I just think it’s too complex and you’d need too many things to happen accidentally,’
For what little that’s worth. That is the only scientific statement in that piece.
thansks,
zahir
Hi Zahir,
I know this. There is a question-mark in the heading, right?
Many people like to suggest that what is written in the Bible could never have been true, under any circumstance.
These articles suggest that there is more to it.
That is all the claim there is in any of this.
To give you an example. Certain nerve cells were “scientifically” known to NEVER regenerate under any circumstances. Period. That was your firm science only a few years ago.
Today, it is equally firm science (and becoming industrially viable) that the hearing cells in the ear can and do regenerate.
I am concerned to show that that theoretical possibility of parthenogenesis does in fact exist.
Fifty years ago, scientists denied it could EVER take place in the animal kingdom.
http://www.zo.utexas.edu/courses/THOC/VirginBirth.html
Today we know it is wide-spread. Today, it is considered ‘impossible” in human beings. Tomorrow, they will find it happens.
There have always been some women who have made the claim. Are they all naive, brain-washed, lying, or concealing rape? I know the political reasons why this story of the “virgin birth” must be ridiculed – it is the heart of both Christianity and Paganism. But it is not the heart of Judaism.
It was not economic “scientists” who explained accurately what happened in the financial crisis.
It was the “tabloid” sensational press,, the Christian libertarians and the “lunatic fringe.”
Thus I comb these sites, looking for the interesting factoid, the speculation that goes in the right direction, the winds of opinion change.
Scientists outside their field are just as credulous, biased, ignorant, and political as anyone else, often more – so their speculations aren’t dispositive to me at all.
The Daily Mail is a tabloid. It exaggerates and sometimes lies, but I really didn’t find the claims in the body of the piece wrong. Just the sensational headline, which gets people to read.
I read the piece there first so I linked it.
Science in fact has proven parthenogenesis in many species.
http://www.ozy.com/rising-stars-and-provocateurs/the-virgin-birth-advocate/30730.article
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/discoblog/2010/10/04/ncbi-rofl-self-fertilization-in-human-having-a-male-embryo-without-a-father/
Also, finally, the major point is that the scientists say that parthenogenesis will not occur NATURALLY.
Well, yes. The Biblical account of the incarnation is that it occurred through divine intervention.
So,first, the possibility exists in nature (where previously such a possibility was denied); second the Bible did not claim the incarnation occurred “naturally” but divinely or from spiritual intervention activating a process that indeed can take place with activation.
Hi Lila. I won’t look for a scientific explanation for immaculate birth. Who is to say that “miracles” don’t happen?
I am told that “miracles” is part of belief, not science. I agree with that sentiment. While it is true that what we don’t understand we often attribute to “miracle”. Atheists make this argument a lot. But belief systems transcend the left-half logic-only brain and is part of the right-half spiritual/intuitive/insight brain where higher levels of perception and understanding are seated. This is empirical discovery of cognitive and neuro science, and it is the basis of the two lovable characters in Star Trek, Capt Kirk and Mr. Spock. The latter has no right-half brain, and is logic-only science officer on the starship enterprise. He is beat everytime by the humanbeing Capt. Kirk who possesses both halves of the brain in non-zero measure to Mr. Spock’s zero right half brain. And what does he possess that Mr. Spock cannot ever comprehend with his empirical science? Intuituion, faith, gut-feel, insight, all of which go into contributing to the beliefs of the Captain in what is not quantifiable, which is what helps him save his mission time and again to Mr. Spock’s obvious fascination. Fables aside, to search for the basis of “miracles” pertaining to belief systems in science is specious, at best. Which is not to say that science at times answers the question which appear to be miraculous to people in earlier times. Which is why some, many in fact, physicists have noted that “science answers the question how, while religion answers the question why”. Having said that, science can only answer the question which is within its empiricism ambit, and no farther. Surely you would agree with this — which is why it appears a tad unusual to me that you might be looking for scientific explanations for religious beliefs. Immaculate conception of Jesus is at the heart of Christianity, and is also underscored in Islam as well as “miraculous”. So I wonder if or when science answers the question “how” of immaculate conception, does it still remain miraculous even if no one can reproduce it?
Hope all is well with you. Take care,
Zahir
Oh, just as a preface to my comment above, I think the term “miracle” needs a precise definition.
Miracle: an event which is a singularity, has no identifiable causality, there is no way to get to that event by following a causal chain.
In that definition, I think I answered my own question there at the end!
It is not a miracle, whether or not it is reproducible, if it is not a singularity, has a causal chain.
hope that was useful in bringing clarity to the matter.
thanks
Zahir