Ann Coulter on Embryonic Stem-Cell Research

Tellingly, liberals' one example of the The Republican War on Science, as one book title puts it, is the Christian objection to Nazi experimentation on human embryos. As with other "sciences" admired by liberals, their enthusiasm for embryonic stem-cell research is based on lies. Liberals lie about the science on stem-cell research because they warm to the idea of destroying human embryos. If they can desensitize Americans to the idea of harvesting human embryos for imaginary medical cures, liberals believe it will advance the cause of killing the unborn. As columnist Anna Quidlen said, the "pro-choicers" were always "at a loss" when faced with moral arguments in defense of an unborn baby. But with embryonic stem-cell research, Quidlen said, the "battle of personification will assume a different and more sympathetic visage in the years to come"--taking the form of Michael J. Fox, Christopher Reeve, Ronald Reagan, and other beloved public figures for whom embryonic stem-cell researchers promise miracle cures they are not close to producing.

Although there has been research on both adult stem cells and embryonic stem cells since the fifties, only adult stem-cell research has produced any cures--and lots of'em. Adult stem cells have been used for decades to treat dozens of diseases, including Type 1 diabetes, liver disease, and spinal cord injuries. Curently, adult stem cells are used to treat more than eighty different diseases.

Harvard medical researcher Denise Faustman has used adult stem cells to cure diabetes in mice. Other cures from adult stem cells are being tested in hundreds of clinical trials. Adult stem-cell researchers in Switzerlatake a few strands of hair from burn victims and use the follicular stem cells on the tips to create entire disks of new skin, a vast improvement on ugly skin grafts. Recently, patients with damaged livers have been helped by injections of bone marrow adult stem cells collected not directly from their marrow (an extremely painful procedure) but simply cultivated from their blood.

By contrast, the embryonic stem-cell researchers have produced nothing. They have treated nothing. They have not begun one human clinical trial. They've successfully treated a few rodents, but they keep running into two problems: First, the cells tend to be rejected by the immune system. Second, they tend to cause malignancies called teratomas--meaning "monster tumors."

The idea that embryonic stem cells are on the verge of curing anything is absurd. It's possible embryonic stem-cell research could find a cure for Alzheimer's disease someday only in the sense that it is possible that a biologist's toenail clippings could be used to find a cure for Alzheimer's someday. Liberals aren't demanding that taxpayer money be used for research on toenail clippings; that would not advance their governing principle, which is to always kill human life (unless the human life being killed is likely to fly a plane into American skyscrapers, in which case, it is wrong to kill it).

The only advantage embryonic stem cells once had over adult stem cells was their ability to transform into any type of cell. But fast-advancing research on adult stem cells has stripped away even that theoretical advantage. As of 2002, adult stem cells were being converted into all three types of cells the body produces during early embryonic development. And adult stem cells were already curing people!

Embryonic stem-cell researchers were in trouble. It was as if thirty years after the invention of electricity, they were still trying to get someone to fund their research on candles. Results tend to draw more research dollars than pie-in-the-sky claims to maybe, possibly someday find a cure for Alzheimer's disease, diabetes, paralysis, Parkinson's disease, PMS, balding, and hemorrhodial itch. No one is going to buy a drawing of a potential cure when somebody else is already selling the cure.

Embryonic stem-cell researchers had only one choice: Accuse anyone opposed to taxpayer funding of embryonic stem-cell research of being "anti-science." As Michael Fumento says, it was the very success of adult stem-cell research compared with the abject failure of embryonic stem-cell research that led to the all-out PR campaign: "Savvy venture capitalists have poured their money into ASCs, leaving ESC researchers desperate to feed at the federal (or state) trough."

While adult stem-cell researchers were in their labs quietly discovering cures, embryonic stem-cell researchers were mounting a massive public relations assault that not only promised cures for every known human malady but also viciously attacked adult stem-cell research as useless. This is perhaps not surprising, since--in contrast to researchers on adult stem cells--embryonic stem-cell researchers are virtually never doctors. They're biologists. They don't care about healing people, they just want to be paid to push petri dishes around the lab, cut up a living human embryo, and sell it for parts like a stolen Toyota at a chop shop.

It's always the same thing with liberals. Time and again doctors are just minding their own business trying to cure people and liberal special interest groups swoop in and take all their money. The most valuable people in society are under constant assualt from trial lawyers, biologists, and class-warfare Democrats.

Appropriately, the spokesman for liberal "science" was once again a rich white male Southern lawyer doing a passable impression of Miss Cleo. At an Iowa campaign stop during the 2004 presidential campaign, John Edwards promised, "We will stop juvenile diabetes, Parkinson's, Alzheimer's and other debilitating diseases. . . . When John Kerry is president, people like Christopher Reeve are going to get up out of that wheelchair and walk again." Long predicted, it had finally happened: the Democrats had put Elmer Gantry on their presidential ticket. If one wanted to cure the lame, one could reasonably start with John Edwards.

Extravagant promises of miraculous cures turned out to be an extremely effective argument with people who knew nothing about the science involved, such as actors. In a grim irony, Christopher Reeve died waiting for the miracle cure promised by embryonic stem-cell researchers about the same time a South Korean woman who had been paralyzed for nineteen years began to walk again with the help of a walker--thanks to injection of umbilical cord stem cells into the injured part of her spine. Long before Reeve died, two paralyzed American women with spinal cord injuries, Laura Dominguez and Susan Fajt, were treated with adult stem cells in Portugal. Both regained most upper body movement and began to walk with braces.

At a debate in New York before Reeve died, the head of a biotechnology company actually put his hand over the mouth of Reeve's debating partner to prevent Reeve from hearing about the stunning advances being made with adult stem-cell cures. Plan B was to plug up Reeve's earswith his fingers while humming loudly. They're all about the dignity of the disabled, these liberals. Until Michael Fumento wrote about Hwang Mi-soon, the South Korean woman who began to walk again thanks to adult stem cells, there was no mention of it in any document on Nexis.

At least the embryonic stem-cell researchers have a clear financial incentive to lie about adult stem-cell research. Liberals just want to kill human beings. Everyone with a doddering ninety-year-old parent is suddenly gung-ho on experimenting on human embryos--or "blastocysts," as they are affectionately known to the "scientific community." The Worst Generation is so appalled at the idea of having to take care of Mom and Dad, they're lashing out at embryos.

Stem-cell research on embryos is an even worse excuse for the slaughter of life than abortion. No woman is even being spared an inconvenience of time. We don't have to hear the ghastly arguments of mothers against their own children, the travails of girls being sent away to live with their aunt for a few months, or the stories of women carrying babies of rapists--as if that's happened more than twice in the last half century. This is just harvest and slaughter, harvest and slaughter. There's a famous book about this practice. It's called Brave New World.

Nobody ever heard of this incredibly important research on human embryos until ten minutes ago, yet everyone makes believe he's known about the undiscovered bounty of in human embryos forever, and talks about it with real moral indignation. This whole debate is a hoax designed to trick Americans into yielding ground on human experimentation.

What great advances are we to expect from experimentation on human embryos--as opposed to adult stem cells, which have already produced cures? Liberals don't know. It's just a theory. But they definitely need to start slaughtering the unborn. Why not have the government give me a lot of money so I can sit around and think. Who knows what I might come up with? I'm clever. It's possible. Give money to Ann or condemn the world to disease and pestilence! It is simply asserted that scientists need to experiment on human embryos if they are ever going to find a cure for Alzheimer's disease, cancer, AIDS, Parkisons disease, and so on. Maybe. If it's true, but no one has demonstrated that it is true. Liberals are sobbing and groaning that we don't know if the Strategic Defense Initative will work. We shot a missile out of the sky. What's their proof? Decades of research are called for in the case of human embryos. We don't know if this will work or not, but just to be on the safe side we'd better start chopping up as many human embryos as we can get our hands on. Whereas global warming is a closed matter in need of no further study.

The last great advance for human experimentation in this country was the federal government's acquiescence to the scientific community's demands for money to experiment on aborted fetuses. Denouncing the "Christian right" for opposing the needs of science, Anthony Lewis of the New York Times claimed in Feburary 2000 that the experiments were "crucial to potential cures for Parkinson's disease."

Almost exactly a year later, the Times ran a front-page story describing the results of those experiments on Parkinson's patients: Not only was there no positive effect from injecting fetal brain tissue into the recipients, but about 15 percent of the patients had nightmarish side effects. The unfortunate patients "writhe and twist, jerk their heads, fling their arms about." In the words of one of one scientist, "They chew constantly, their fingers go up and down, their wrists flex and distend." And the worst thing was, the scientists couldn't turn it off.

But the science that is working--adult stem-cell research--gets attacked and lied about in order to elevate the science that has produced nothing. In the August 24, 2004, New York Times, science writer Gina Kolata claimed that no one had succeeded in using adult stem cells "to treat diseases."

A short list of the successful treatments achieved by adult stem cells are these:

No doubt the remaining federal restrictions on embryonic stem-cell research will soon be swept aside. Federal funding is limited to pre-existing cell lines, but with private money, everything is permitted. Meanwhile the California initiative seems set to provide $3 billion for embryo research, so the states may soon take their turn digging into taxpayers' pockets. The issue was boosted during the Democratic convention, when Nancy Reagan's son spoke to an admiring audience, saying that embryonic stem cell research was "like magic." It may be "the greatest medical breakthrough in our or in any lifetime." In Newsweek, Nancy's daughter Patti Davis called stem cells "the miracle that can cure not only Alzheimer's but many other diseases." Ron Reagan omitted Alzheimer's but said stem cells "could cure" Parkinson's, multiple sclerosis, diabetes, lymphoma spinal cord injuries "and much more."

When the funding restriction breaks down, as I predict it will, reports of stem-cell miracles will rapidly fade. "Breakthroughs" will be reported on schedule, as always, but actual cures are unlikely to ensue. That's what happened with the Human Genome Project. (Remember that?) It was wholly hyped, fully funded, and given its own employment center at the National Institutes of Health. Once that was accomplished, little more was heard of the disease-curing potential of the genome sequence. The reason is clear enough. That potential has turned out to be little more than zero. A similar scenario will probably unfold with embryonic stem cells.

The stem-cell campaign was bolstered by the familiar hostility to religious sentiment. It has not been difficult for the propagandists to represent opposition to government-financed embryo research as obstructionism borne of bigotry -- fundamentalism standing in the path of progress as always. Religion, so the argument goes, has been up to its old tricks: thwarting science and enlightenment.

In a good essay in the Weekly Standard, Eric Cohen and William Kristol commented that embryo research is "potentially more corrupting than abortion." It is "a fruit we seek, not a transgression we tolerate. It is a premeditated project, not a decision made in crisis." Conservatives have held the line against the moral horrors of embryo research -- Mengele Medicine, it might be called -- but they have been too disposed to take the scientific claims of biotech at face value. Such claims are always greatly exaggerated, and always with the same goal in mind: attracting government funding, private investment, or both.

We get miracles in the headlines, but the fine print tells a different story. As to the prospects of a cure for Alzheimer's, for example, the Wall Street Journal told us (on an inside page): "With some conditions, such as Alzheimer's disease, science has yet to understand what goes wrong. Simply replacing damaged brain cells with new ones grown in the lab from stem cells isn't yet feasible and may not be for decades, researchers say."

A miracle cure -- in a few decades' time. Maybe. Why is this nonsense tolerated by the editorial high command of magazines like Newsweek?

Rick Weiss of the Washington Post did blow the whistle in this instance, pointing out that Alzheimer's was an implausible candidate for stem-cell treatment. But the newspaper is inclined to treat the National Institutes of Health, in Bethesda, Maryland, as an important segment of its subscriber base, not as a lavishly funded government agency that constantly promotes its own expansion. Perhaps one day the Post will be as suspicious of the NIH as it is of the Pentagon and the CIA.

DIABETES HAS ALSO FEATURED prominently in the stem-cell hype. In juvenile-onset diabetes (the serious kind), the cells that make insulin, called islet cells, are erroneously destroyed by the body's own immune system. The hope is that replacements can be created out of stem cells. I spoke to Scott King, a friend of mine who both has this form of diabetes and runs a biotech company, Cerco Medical, that is looking for an effective treatment for diabetes. Researchers have not yet succeeded in turning one stem cell into an islet cell, he said. In fact, they don't even know where in the embryo to look for a plausible candidate cell. Early promise soon faded. Stem cells, in one account, have been unwilling to "respond to the scientists' commands." They have proved to be "extraordinarily difficult to manipulate."

It's beginning to look as though the vaunted potential of stem cells to be transformed into specialized cells is little more than a tautology. The fully-grown body starts life as two cells, a sperm and an egg. The cells of the embryo then multiply, and it is true by definition that those early cells have the "potential" to turn into all the cells of the body, numbering literally in the trillions. We know that because they do so in fact. The fully grown body must have originated from cells that were present in the embryonic phase. They certainly didn't come from outside the body. But how far does this get us?

What it overlooks is that the specialized cells develop their differentiated functions as a result of interactions with other cells in the growing body. The assumption that the cell can be removed from this environment and then "coaxed" in the lab dish to evolve in the direction that experimenters desire is mere hubris. It is comparable to believing that pupils can be removed from a school that produces successful scholars, in the belief that even more students can be prepared by giving them special tutoring. The problem is that they don't know which students to isolate, or what their special training should be. And all along it was the school itself that created the indispensable conditions for learning.

Genetic engineering is turning out to be as hard to achieve in our day as social engineering was in the Communist era. Curiously, the opposite error seems to be involved. Social engineering was (rightly) derided as unattainable because "nature" was overlooked. Genes were disregarded as unimportant. Genetic engineering in contrast has omitted to consider the role of "nurture," or the environment of the cell. Genes are now thought to be autonomous and all important -- wrong again.

STEVE MILLOY OF THE CATO Institute believes that stem cell hype began with researchers and investors who were counting on taxpayer funding to increase the value of their stakes in biotech companies. They could then "cash out at a hefty profit, leaving the taxpayers holding the bag of fruitless research." When Bush failed to cooperate they "were enraged and began a campaign to pressure the President into opening the taxpayer spigots … on the basis of a wild-eyed hope that cures are near at hand."

It's an interesting theory, and one would like to see more of this skepticism from the mainstream media. There may be some truth to it, too, although I would like to see more in the way of specifics. Who was behind California's Proposition 71, for example?

Meanwhile, there is another motive that is more universal and probably more destructive than greed: the search for security and comfort. Scientists no doubt believe their own wild predictions of biotech cures, but it is not important whether they do or not. What is at stake is a cushy life for science. Once that is attained, and scientists get their funding, their lifetime tenure, their extra lab assistants, and their up-to-date equipment, little of medical value will emerge from their labs.

What changes in science when the most important consideration becomes sustaining a political consensus in favor of funding it by taxation? It's a question that isn't even asked. Soviet science didn't exactly flourish. What happened to the hundred-billion odd that has been spent on the War on Cancer? My guess is that our notion of what science is undergoes a subtle but fatal change once it is obliged to meet a political test, and consensus replaces competition. But that is another story. Mengele Medicine

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