No human embryos in new growth media

Wednesday, January 4. 2006

No human embryos in new growth media

So I contacted the authors of the paper that I blogged about yesterday. They were nice enough to send me the paper and after a review I find no evidence that they used any human embryos for their new growth media. Although, they did destroy 5 human lives for their 2 stem cell lines that only remained genetically intact for 7 months. I was almost sick when I read their cold description of the stem cell extraction process:

After obtaining institutional review board approval and informed consent (HSC Protocol #2000-434), frozen human pre-embryos that were fertilized for fertility treatment but were in excess of clinic need were thawed for the purpose of deriving new human ES cell lines. Using commercially available sequential embryo culture media (Vitrolife - GIII Series) supplemented with 5% Serum Protein Substitute (SPS: Cooper Surgical), thefrozen/thawed embryos were cultured for seven days in 10µL drops under oil at 37ºC and 5% O2/10% CO2/85% N2. After removal of the zona pellucida with pronase, the inner cell mass (ICM) of five human blastocysts were isolated by immunosurgery and plated in 4-well culture plates (Nunc) onto defined human matrix.

In case you aren't sure the "After removal of the zona pellucida with pronase, the inner cell mass (ICM) of five human blastocysts were isolated by immunosurgery" part is where they destroyed these little lives.

Posted by Rebecca Taylor in Stem cells, Embryonic at 19:10 | Comments (0) | Trackback (1)

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Minced-up Human Fetuses
Awhile back I wrote about a new media for growing embyonic stem cell lines. This new media was "animal-free." I surmised that it may be taken from minced-up human embryos. Turned out in that case, I was wrong. But I was not far off. It seems

Weblog: Mary Meets Dolly
Tracked: Jan 23, 05:48

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