Word: celle
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Officially, as many as 2 million Americans suffer from mitochondrial disease. But because defects in the mitochondria may underlie an astonishing range of very familiar illnesses, researchers are beginning to suspect that the real number is vastly higher. In the past few weeks alone, reports have come out in Cell, Nature and the Journal of Neuroscience implicating the mitochondria as factors in diseases such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's. Indeed, says Dr. Vamsi Mootha, a Harvard Medical School researcher who won a MacArthur Foundation "genius" grant in 2004 for his work on mitochondria, "it looks like they're really...
...known mitochondrial diseases, though, it's clearly a genetic abnormality that almost always sets things off. Mitochondria are different from the rest of the cell in that they have their own DNA, inherited directly from the mother (with no input from the father) that's entirely separate from the DNA in the nucleus. Evolutionary biologists suspect, in fact, that these organelles started out as independent bacteria that were absorbed long ago into cells and harnessed as energy factories...
TIME: Dr. Collins, I know you favor the opening of new stem-cell lines for experimentation. But doesn't the fact that faith has caused some people to rule this out risk creating a perception that religion is preventing science from saving lives...
COLLINS: Let me first say as a disclaimer that I speak as a private citizen and not as a representative of the Executive Branch of the United States government. The impression that people of faith are uniformly opposed to stem-cell research is not documented by surveys. In fact, many people of strong religious conviction think this can be a morally supportable approach...
DAWKINS: For me, moral questions such as stem-cell research turn upon whether suffering is caused. In this case, clearly none is. The embryos have no nervous system. But that's not an issue discussed publicly. The issue is, Are they human? If you are an absolutist moralist, you say, "These cells are human, and therefore they deserve some kind of special moral treatment." Absolutist morality doesn't have to come from religion but usually does...