No, Bush did not ban embryonic stem cell research. Never mind what left-wing talk radio host Ed Schultz keeps saying. Like the House Republicans, perhaps you, too, should listen to Rush Limbaugh. Perhaps Ed should, as well, to get his demagoguery straight.
We now return you to your regularly scheduled blog.
President Obama took a jab at former President Bush with this phrase from his inaugural speech; "We will restore science to its rightful place….". This implies that science has been taken down off of some pillar that it should reside on.
Science is important in the betterment of humankind, but science must be tempered by morality (as must all things). Dubya, for example, kept federal funding for embryonic stem cell research for those cell lines already existing at the time, but his moral concerns over the issue prevented his allowing it unhindered. (Private funding is still available and, indeed, the research is continuing.) Is Obama suggesting he’ll place science above morality? Is submitting science to the scrutiny of morality robbing the former of it’s "rightful place"? Is this his worldview?
FuturePundit reports on two more papers that show we can take adult stem cells and turn them in pluripotent stem cells; those just as useful and flexible as embryonic stem cells. Since there are absolutely no ethical issues with the use of adult stem cells, the question then has to be; why don’t we funnel the research dollars going into embryonic stem cells into this instead? You would think there’s some ulterior motive or something.
The latest advancement in stem cells is that it’s getting safer to convert adult stem cells to “induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells” (basically what embryonic stems cells are). Adult stem cells are already curing loads of diseases, without the need for destroying embryos. This is just one less reason to want to rely on the ethically murky embryonic ones.
Again we find that stem cells could be the cure for things that had been incurable.
Heart attacks occur when the heart muscle is starved of oxygen, usually because the arteries that supply it with blood become blocked with fatty deposits. A bypass operation restores this blood supply, but the lack of oxygen leads to permanent scarring of the heart muscle.
Even after the operation the heart’s activity does not return to normal. "If you have a large heart attack like this and you are lucky and are referred for a bypass operation, your quality of life will be permanently affected because the pumping function of your heart is reduced," said Raimondo Ascione, the surgeon who is leading the research. "Your tolerance to exercise is reduced so you can’t really enjoy your life."
The trial will involve patients with the worst prognosis, those who have scarring on at least half of the left ventricular wall. "It’s the worst heart attack you can have. Most patients just die," said Ascione.
The team will extract bone marrow from all 60 patients and separate out a class of stem cells that makes up 1% of the tissue. Previous studies have suggested that this cell type is able to regenerate heart muscle cells and blood vessels. By using the patient’s own cells there will be no problems with tissue rejection.
But again, as well, is a missing word in the article. It’s implied in that last quoted paragraph, but it’s not said by name. These are adult stem cells, from the patient. Very little these days is said about adult stem cells, because of the agenda of folks who want embryonic stem cell research to get federal funding.
The question isn’t whether or not embryonic stem cells would be useful. The real question is; if adult stem cells have such wide, varied uses, and have been proven to work time after time, why do we want to step into the ethical quagmire of using embryos?
[tags]stem cells,Raimondo Ascione,heart disease,medicine[/tags]
So often in our world today, we grind up against those who have strongly held positions that we cannot understand. For myself, at this time, I fail to understand how anyone could hold a pro-abortion or even pro-choice point of view. The arguments “for” seem so weak as to be almost non-existent. Now this might be because I fail to enumerate or see the key insight behind a particular argument. So, below the fold, I’m going to attempt to enumerate all the arguments I know for the silencing of the lambs and summarize briefly why they are fundamentally unsound. My request for any readers of this would be to point out what I’m missing, why my critique misses the point, or to pass this on to someone who might be able to do so. Read the rest of this entry
Now that normal skin cells can be made to mimic embryonic stem cells, you’d think that the big push to keep destroying embryos and the ethical considerations that accompany it would pretty much die out. You’d be wrong. Michael J. Fox, one of the more vocal and visible players advocating embryonic stem cell research, will have none of that.
MENOUNOS: Tell me what that does to Parkinson’s and how exciting that was for you?
FOX: Well any of these breakthroughs are fantastic. And it’s just thrilling. And at the same time too we don’t want to discontinue the embryonic stem cell research that’s being done because one begat the other and, and it all becomes part of a broad canvas that we want to continue to work on.
In the name of some ephemeral “broad canvas”, Fox simply won’t let go of his emotional tie (how else to explain it) to actual embryos. Science could very well get rid of the need to deal with the ethical and moral entanglement, but Fox won’t cut the umbilical cord.
MENOUNOS: Do you think that this will end the whole hot button issue of stem cell research?
FOX: Well I want to make sure that we, that, that doesn’t happen. But I think that the bottom line is whatever happens in the next election, the chances are very good that there’s gonna be a new attitude towards science.
Sounds to me like it’s Fox who needs to new attitude. Science is progressing, George W. Bush’s stand against destroying embryos has been vindicated, but Fox is stuck in his ways and his politics.
FOX: Well just about everybody’s in favor of it with the couple of exceptions on the, on the Republican side. But, but what I did in the last election in the midterm was not about parties but, but about who was in a race where they supported stem cell research and, and were, were opposed by someone who’s not in favor of stem cell research.
MENOUNOS: Who are you backing this election?
FOX: Whoever the most pro-science candidate is that comes out of either primary.
Turns out that Dubya’s faith in science — that it would find a way around destroying embryos — is the most pro-science of them all. Too bad he’s not running for re-election, eh Michael?
[tags]embryonic stem cells,science,Michael J. Fox,abortion[/tags]
As I’ve noted over and over and over again, adult stem cells are a win-win situation; they have amazing curative powers and have none of the ethical issues associated with embryonic ones. Well now, we hear of yet another source of stem cells that fit that category.
Scientists have made ordinary human skin cells take on the chameleon-like powers of embryonic stem cells, a startling breakthrough that might someday deliver the medical payoffs of embryo cloning without the controversy.
Laboratory teams on two continents report success in a pair of landmark papers released Tuesday. It’s a neck-and-neck finish to a race that made headlines five months ago, when scientists announced that the feat had been accomplished in mice.
The “direct reprogramming” technique avoids the swarm of ethical, political and practical obstacles that have stymied attempts to produce human stem cells by cloning embryos.
The fact that adult stem cells have been reprogrammed and used successfully isn’t mentioned in the article. You’d think the didn’t exist or were still very experimental by reading it. It’s unfortunate that these successes don’t get more play from the media, but then again, it’s a liberal media, and liberals have a fixation on embryonic experimentation, so that’s to be expected, claims of objectivity notwithstanding.
Still, it’s wonderful to hear the press acknowledging that there are indeed ethical considerations and that this new research could very well remove the need to wrestle with them. This kind of research is something we can all get behind, I believe, regardless of political and/or religious pursuasion.
There are still some issues to be worked out, notable the cancer risk, but this quote is incredibly promising.
“People didn’t know it would be this easy,” [James] Thomson [of the University of Wisconsin-Madison]said. “Thousands of labs in the United States can do this, basically tomorrow.”
Let’s hope so.
[tags]science,stem cells,cloning,direct reprogramming,ethics,morality,James Thomson,University of Wisconsin-Madison[/tags]
Adult stem cells, that is.
University of Manchester researchers have transformed fat tissue stem cells into nerve cells — and now plan to develop an artificial nerve that will bring damaged limbs and organs back to life.
In a study published in October’s Experimental Neurology, Dr Paul Kingham and his team at the UK Centre for Tissue Regeneration (UKCTR) isolated the stem cells from the fat tissue of adult animals and differentiated them into nerve cells to be used for repair and regeneration of injured nerves. They are now about to start a trial extracting stem cells from fat tissue of volunteer adult patients, in order to compare in the laboratory human and animal stem cells.
Research continues in both adult and embryonic stem cells, but the big news from adult stem cells just keep coming and coming. What’s interesting is that this breakthrough could lead to the very result that the late Christopher Reeve and other supporters was suggesting could happen only if the feds paid for embryonic stem cell research. But here we have stem cells that could potentially repair nerves with nary an ethical or moral issue.
So why the exaggerated imperative over embryonic stem cells? One has to wonder.
[tags]Christopher Reeve,stem cells,medicine,science,Paul Kingham,University of Manchester,artificial nerve,bionic nerve[/tags]
