Article

2006-08-07 Europe

A barbaric kind of beauty - Embryonic Stem Cells for Cosmetics

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Posted by mcsegeeek 2006-08-07 11:59|| || Front Page|| [3 views since 2007-05-07] Top

#1 Yeah, I know. I posted it without comment because I was so pissed I couldn't think of what to say.

Posted by mcsegeeek1 2006-08-07 13:13|| 2006-08-07 13:13|| Front Page Top

#2 Vain women putting themselves at serious risk, paying huge sums for to be the proving grounds for unvetted treatments. Ignoring that the entire situation is immoral, that is just plain Darwin-award dumb. I will feel no sympathy for any of the parties when the horrific side effects appear.

It was the same a decade ago when Human Growth hormone replacement therapy was the hot thing, only it turns out the cascading side effects are killer dangerous at the levels then prescribed.

Posted by trailing wife 2006-08-07 14:20|| 2006-08-07 14:20|| Front Page Top

#3 TW, I know you weren't implying otherwise, but to me, the moral argument is the only one worth having. BTW - I actually HOPE there are horrific side effects.

Posted by mcsegeeek1 2006-08-07 14:36|| 2006-08-07 14:36|| Front Page Top

#4 Eating your own children - for vanity.

I'm reminded of the tale "Akallabeth" in the Silmarillion.

Posted by no mo uro 2006-08-07 14:37|| 2006-08-07 14:37|| Front Page Top

#5 Telegraph.co.uk

Unpalatable but true: cannibalism was routine
By Tim Taylor
(Filed: 15/10/2003)

The science of cannibalism has just become respectable, as irrefutable bio-molecular evidence that we have eaten each other for millennia spurs renewed efforts by archaeologists, geneticists and anthropologists to find out when we started to do it, and why.

With the Lendu and Hema militias currently cooking human hearts and livers under the eyes of UN observers in north-east Congo, and the abduction of children for food in North Korea, it is hard to believe that until recently academia was dominated by politically correct assertions that cannibalism did not exist. While no one denied that psychopaths and the very hungry do it sometimes, eye-witness accounts of routine cannibalism were ignored.

In his 1979 book, The Man-Eating Myth, the social anthropologist William Arens told a generation of scholars what they wanted to hear: stories of cannibal tribes were the racist slanders of white imperialist scientists.

Survival cannibalism made headlines after the 1973 Andes air crash. Sixteen Catholics had stayed alive by eating those who either died on impact or subsequently. The Vatican advised that, although those who had chosen to starve were not guilty of the sin of suicide, those who practised cannibalism had not sinned either: the souls of the deceased were with God, the corpses profane husks.

The ease with which humans switch into survival mode should have alerted the anthropologists who espoused Arens that their cherished theory was fictional. Archaeologically, cannibal behaviour was evident all along, from prehistoric Fiji to the Aztecs to the Neanderthals of Europe.

There is now an overwhelming case that cannibalism is a worldwide phenomenon, stretching back to our evolutionary origins: wild chimpanzees and 70 other mammal species have been observed killing and eating each other, while the two-million-year-old Homo habilis cranium known as Stw 53 is covered with deliberate cut marks.

With this in our behavioural inheritance, the question of why we started to do it fades away. More interesting is the cannibalism we have chosen. The emerging picture is of two main types, one aggressive, as on Pueblo-Indian sites where children's skulls were used to cook their brains; the other reverential, as in the Siberian Iron Age, where select cuts of meat were removed from bodies before burial to make a funeral meal.

Sceptics who have argued against these interpretations now have the findings of molecular biology to deal with. Desiccated human faeces, preserved for a thousand years among smashed bone at the Pueblo-Indian site of Cowboy Wash , have been found to contain protein unique to human heart muscle.

This is the remains of just one meal, eaten in one place, but there is new evidence that is global in extent. Researchers from University College London, having identified gene-based resistance to diseases of the mad-cow type among the Fore of Papua New Guinea - who only recently gave up eating their dead - went on to identify it in all the rest of us as well. John Collinge of UCL sees the pattern of chromosomal modification as due to the evolutionary "selection pressure" of past cannibalism-related diseases.

The question is why has cannibalism, by and large, stopped? The answer has less to do with innate decency or moral progress than with status. For most of the hunter-gatherer period a community could not afford not to eat its dead or its dead enemies. With farming came a certain pride in displaying a life of plenty. Human burials and cremations were (and are) acts of conspicuous consumption.

It is easy to think that what "we" do is what all right-thinking humans do. And it is hard, in our supermarket culture, to imagine what it is like to scavenge for food. But the careful procedures of science can uncover the truth in the face of hardened preconceptions.

Now we know that cannibalism was a widespread norm in the past, we need to find out why particular societies gave it up. Somewhat uncomfortably, the reason in Papua New Guinea, after the Australian government's suppression of funerary cannibalism in the Fifties, seems to have been a desire on the part of the indigenous population to be reincarnated as affluent white people.

Dr Taylor teaches at the Department of Archaeological Sciences, University of Bradford. His book, The Buried Soul: How Humans Invented Death was published in paperback this week (Fourth Estate) and is available for £8.99 + £2.25 p&p. To order call Telegraph Books Direct on 0870 155 7222.

19 June 2003: 160,000-year-old skulls fill crucial gap in evolution
8 June 2003[News]: Famine-struck N Koreans 'eating children'
1 March 2001: Bones point to Iron Age cannibalism

Posted by Besoeker 2006-08-07 14:49|| 2006-08-07 14:49|| Front Page Top

#6 Excellent post, Besoeker.

The left's wished-for myth of the noble, gentle savage, whether promoted in books like the one mentioned in your post or in events like the popularization of the mythical Tasaday people, show just how delusional and dyfunctional and insecure the descendants of the French Revolution have become.

Tolkien was a classical liberal, not a modernist or post-modernist, and unlike the advocates of movements, recognized that consuming your own was immoral as well as unworkable.

A regression to pre-civilization, really.

Posted by no mo uro 2006-08-07 15:00|| 2006-08-07 15:00|| Front Page Top

#7 In case anyone missed it... the money quote:

Here, poverty-stricken young women are paid 200 U.S. dollars to carry babies up to the optimum eight to 12-week period - thought to be best for harvesting stem cells. They are then sold on to cosmetic clinics.

In short these fetuses are being grown and then killed so some rich bitch can have a cleaner face.

Sick!

Posted by CrazyFool 2006-08-07 15:02|| 2006-08-07 15:02|| Front Page Top

#8 CrazyFool-

If you want to read a chilling book on this very subject, pick up "Never Let Me Go". Very well written, and a good treatise on how easy it might be for people to grow humans for transplants.

Posted by no mo uro 2006-08-07 15:04|| 2006-08-07 15:04|| Front Page Top

#9 Beoserker: Have you ever read much about the mythology and history re: the Pueblo Indians?

Posted by Phil 2006-08-07 15:21|| 2006-08-07 15:21|| Front Page Top

#10 Human Life now given stature below that of live stock.

The slope was so slippery no one realized they were sliding.

Posted by eLarson 2006-08-07 15:21|| http://larsonian.blogspot.com]">[http://larsonian.blogspot.com] 2006-08-07 15:21|| Front Page Top

#11 #9 Beoserker: Have you ever read much about the mythology and history re: the Pueblo Indians?
Posted by: Phil 2006-08-07 15:21

No I have not, but it sounds interesting.

Posted by Besoeker 2006-08-07 15:55|| 2006-08-07 15:55|| Front Page Top

#12 Narcissism once again rears its ugly head.

"I want to live forever. I want to be young forever. I want to live like a god."

The good news is that these sorts of people aren't having many kids. The bad news is that technology is ever closer to giving them what they want.

Posted by 11A5S 2006-08-07 16:47|| 2006-08-07 16:47|| Front Page Top

#13 Ugg! The ultimate in decadence.

Posted by Snease Shaiting3550 2006-08-07 16:54|| 2006-08-07 16:54|| Front Page Top

#14 I think people are missing a key distinction. The article states "opted for a controversial stem- cell therapy where umbilical cord tissue from new-born babies will be injected into her body. " and not fetal stem cells. I think the article is missleading in that point and people are falling. There's no ban on stem cell research on the whole let alone umbilical cord, just research that come directly from the destruction of a fetus, which I wholehartedly agree is very controversial.

And as for it being used for cosmetics well its their money and if they want to waste it well whatever. I'm sure I would think differently if I were old and shrivelled though.

Posted by AmbiguityX 2006-08-07 17:50|| 2006-08-07 17:50|| Front Page Top

#15 The clinic claims that the foetal tissue derived from elective abortions at six to 12 weeks is rich in regenerative stem cells. 'We inject the cells taken from the liver tissue of human foetuses directly into the vein in the back of your hand,' explains the well-spoken English consultant Jenny, who gives telephone consultations to potential patients.

And where does it stop? Today its fetuses. What will it be tomorrow - baby organs? And then what?

Say - you have pretty eyes. I want them and am going to pay someone top dollar to take them from you. Too bad for you but as you say.... its my money....

Posted by CrazyFool 2006-08-07 18:12|| 2006-08-07 18:12|| Front Page Top

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