On Monday President Barack Obama signed his executive order reversing the ban on federal funding of embryonic stem cell research. He stood proudly with Americans from all over the country……

The scientific community is unanimous on this.

strangelet on March 13, 2009 at 3:09 PM

Like the consensus on global warming…

Better change your tagline to stupid-let.

…has a lot more to do with justifying abortion than it does with actual scientific progress…

Hence a triumph of politics over science.

Science *is* competitive and human stem cell research has already trounced hEsc in its production of clinically applicable treatments and successes. One of my co-workers was diagnosed with multiple myeloma a little over a year ago and is currently finishing a stem-cell bone marrow therapy that has kept another patient (who happens to be a friend of hers) in remission for five years. My friend is a strong, outspoken pro-life Catholic and never would have accepted treatment from an embryonic source. She is doing very well and has actually returned to work two days a week at a point where, absent this type of therapy, most multiple myeloma patients would have succumbed to the disease. To push government financing of research in an area of such moral controversy, no clinical value and in the face of a successful competitor is like mandating continued government promotion of Betamax over VHS.

That is why it appears to me that throwing federal funding at hEsc despite its failures and inherently limited application of tissue replacement has a lot more to do with justifying abortion than it does with actual scientific progress, at least from my admittedly personal experiences

.

Ed’s last sentence says it all.

I truly believe that embryonic stem cell research will never lead to any meaningful treatment, no matter how much money is thrown at it. We will, 10 years from now, be continuously reminded that we are ‘on the verge’ of great breakthroughs, but they will never occur.

The worst thing about it, even worse than the destruction of the embryos, is the false hope that is given to millions of people, simply for political gain.

Fixing our bodies with our own cells is so clearly better than embryo farms, that it shows the sickness of our society that these people aren’t shunned as the stunted people that they are.

Stem cells, ‘master cells’ widely hailed as a ‘repair kit’ for the body, offer hope. However, the creation of fully-functioning 3D organs is ‘remote’, Sir Richard said.

But Professor Stuart Campbell, who has argued for the abortion time limit to be lowered, had no ethical objections to the proposal.
He said many babies were aborted quite late, ‘and if they are going to be terminated, it is a shame to waste their organs’.
He added: ‘I am sure very few of those on the transplant list would rather die than accept an organ from an aborted foetus.’

We have to pray and we have to work together to stop this from ever happening.

I have a couple of type-I diabetic children. I would love nothing more than a cure, but do not want it at the expense of terminating another life. Obviously, I’ve been watching adult stem cell research and am very happy with the progress being made there as well as with Dr. Faustmann’s research with BCG.

At least, treatment is way better than it was even a decade ago, and for that, I can count my blessings.

I think we are getting much closer to a cure and that progress is being made in research that does not destroy life. Too bad the media etc. prefer to ignore it and/or cast adult stem cell breakthroughs as though they came from embryonic research. Sigh…

Canard after Canard. If hESCs were the way to private biotech companies would be pouring money into research because billions could be made. However, these very same companies are already making products using hASCs and are hard at work on adult cell alternatives. We don’t need hESCs to get pluripotent cells. We can do this with ordinary adult skin cells and don’t have the drawback of recipient rejection since they can be manufactured from one’s own skin cells. The fact that hESC research is dependent on government funding indicates that nobody is willing to put their own money into it because there is no there there.

I have proposal for you. I agree to not use any therapies that come from hESCs if you refrain from using therapies developed from hASCs. Now I know this not enforcable but at least as theoretical argument it reveals preferences.

PastorJon….how can I phrase this politely?
Science is the continuous replacement of orthodoxies by heresies which then become orthodoxies, to be replaced by the better model.

Alternatively, Science is the history of dead religions.

strangelet on March 13, 2009 at 3:38 PM

+100.

What I can’t understand is Ed Morrisey’s irrational response to the development of technologies which might help his wife, or others who suffer similarly in the future. He seems utterly devoid of compassion, or perhaps it is the form of compassion evidenced by Mother Theresa -
who wanted her wards to suffer, because suffering was good for the soul (also being good for *her* personally). I wouldn’t go so far as to call Ed a Theresa, but he might be blinded by dogma into thinking that helping others through hESC research is somehow evil.

The fact is that it *will* happen. If not here, then somewhere else and some other time. Or it will prove to be a dead-end. But the research and the promise are there for us now. What right do those like Ed have to stop it? It can save lives. It can end suffering. It is the very essence of good.

If there is a God, and these tissues have a soul, let him worry about them. He condemns babies to burn in hell with the dogma of Original Sin, so why not hESC?

In the course of noting that President Obama’s reversal of the federal embryonic stem cell funding ban may have been undone when he signed the omnibus spending bi……

Sorry but hESC is going nowhere whether it gets government funding or not. We now can create puripotent stem cells from skin tissue without the use of viruses that cause cancer later. hESCs are not needed to develop new therapies. hASCs that can be produced from the patient are superior to hESCs in every way.

if one is clearly superior to the other, why is this so?

If you read the journal articles hESC is far better for disease modelling, and the lines are more long-lived, infinitely better for continuity of experiments.
Read about telomeres.

Alternatively, Science is the history of dead religions.

I.E., we would not have to “clone” a person to get transplantable organs (unlike the techniques used in Robert A. Heinlein’s books). We would just have to clone the organ itself.