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Embryos in sentence

97 examples of Embryos in a sentence

Are these people grown-ups or embryos?
The theme song, bearing the original title "Vampire Hookers," is goofy and tasteless, like the rest of the movie, which gives you xenophobia (locals feed the sailors duck embryos) and homosexual panic (a cross-dresser at a urinal, plus the line "Hey!
For several years, some couples at risk of passing a genetic disease on to their children have used in vitro fertilization, producing several embryos that can be tested for the faulty gene and implanting in the woman’s uterus only those without it.
However, because many IVF practitioners transfer two or three embryos at a time to improve the odds of a pregnancy occurring, twins and higher multiple births are more common, and carry some additional risk.
In a recently released instruction, Dignitas Personae, the Church’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith objects to IVF on several grounds, including the fact that many embryos are created in the process, and few survive.
This outcome is not, however, very different from natural conception, for the majority of embryos conceived by sexual intercourse also fail to implant in the uterine wall, with the woman often not even knowing that she was ever “pregnant.”
Such cells resemble human embryos, which, under European Union patent law, cannot be patented.
Following a ruling by the European Court of Justice (ECJ) in 2011 that those cells constitute human embryos, patent applications for parthenogenetic cells in the United Kingdom and other countries have been delayed and even rejected.
Notably, under the ECJ’s “inherent capacity” definition, the embryos used in that experiment would not constitute a human embryo, and thus would not be excluded from patentability.
These prohibitions are based not just on the need to protect human embryos, but also on concerns relating to the availability of donated egg cells, on which parthenogenesis depends – an issue that neither the courts nor the patent office have considered.
This was, I pointed out, difficult to reconcile with his assertion (concerning the ethics of destroying human embryos to create stem cells) that America’s president has “an important obligation to foster and encourage respect for life in America and throughout the world.”
Brave New World DawningSince 1978, reproductive biologists have helped couples overcome infertility by using increasingly sophisticated techniques for generating and manipulating human embryos in the laboratory.
Found in embryos and adult bone marrow, stem cells have the capacity to divide into other kinds of cells.
But another approach – “germ line gene therapy” (GLGT), which, by modifying sperm, eggs, or embryos, creates a heritable change that affects future generations – is now also approaching practicability.
Last May, Chinese researchers published the results of a partly successful proof-of-principle attempt to edit genes with a system called CRISPR-Cas9, using nonviable embryos that were going to be discarded in any case.
The attendees called for what amounts to a moratorium on the gene editing of embryos leading to a pregnancy, concluding that it would be “irresponsible to proceed” until the risks were better understood and there was “broad societal consensus” about the research.
Of course, there are ethical limitations on gene editing technology; modifying normal embryos for implantation would be unethical.
Diseases that are caused by an abnormal gene from either parent – such as Huntington’s Disease and the relatively common familial hypercholesterolemia, polycystic kidney disease, and neurofibromatosis type 1 – can easily be addressed without modifying embryos.
Instead, one could perform pre-implantation genetic diagnosis to identify a normal embryo (the parents’ eggs and sperm would produce both affected and unaffected embryos), and then implant it in the uterus.
Not only does germ line gene therapy not require the manipulation of normal embryos; it may not even demand the manipulation of abnormal embryos.
The Nuffield report focuses on “germline” gene editing, or genetic alterations of human embryos and gametes that are passed on to future generations.
However, we already have techniques – such as “preimplantation genetic diagnosis” of embryos – which can prevent affected children from being born.
For example, when President George W. Bush announced in 2001 that the United States would not fund research into new stem-cell lines that are created from human embryos, he offered the following reason: “Like a snowflake, each of these embryos is unique, with the unique genetic potential of an individual human being.”
If it is the uniqueness of human embryos that makes it wrong to destroy them, then there is no compelling reason not to take one cell from an embryo and destroy the remainder of it to obtain stem cells, for the embryo’s “unique genetic potential” would be preserved.
Once we abandon arguments based on potential, the claim that it is wrong to kill embryos and fetuses must be based on the nature of those entities themselves – that they are actual human beings who already possess the characteristics that make killing wrong.
If so, then this is all the more true of embryos.
Prenatal testing of fetuses (or of in vitro embryos before transfer to the uterus) is now well established throughout the developed world.
Consider the Korean scientist Hwang Woo-suk, whose claim to have extracted stem cells from human embryos that he cloned turned out to be based on phony research.
Surgically harvesting eggs from a woman's ovaries, fertilizing them outside her body, and transferring the resulting embryos into her uterus enabled effective treatment of female infertility caused by irreparably damaged fallopian tubes.
Freezing unimplanted embryos is now standard procedure; freezing unfertilized eggs is under development.
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