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Just this week, we've learned about functional liver cells that form tissue masses about the size of pennies, derived from cells from umbilical cord stem cells, functional lung cells that make surfactant derived from cells from umbilical cord cells, improvement after heart attacks with cells from the patient's own bone marrow.

Have you seen any of these in the MSM? And I wonder why?

Then there's the request from researchers in the UK ( where such is actually regulated, unlike in the US), who want to make embryos from somatic cell nuclear transfer techniques -- only that want to use cow eggs and human nuclear DNA. Now, why would they decide to go and do such a horrible thing? It could be because although NO ONE has been able to clone a human embryo using human eggs and DNA long enough and far enough to produce a blastocyst that might contain human embryonic stem cells, one Chinese lab *did* report that they had done so using rabbit eggs and human DNA. It's not the shortage of eggs - although that would be a big hurdle if cloning ever became possible - it's the fact that human SCNT has not proven possible.

Shifting to stem-cell research, which you cover in Chapter 9, why is it that more private businesses don’t take on this research? Why is there so much pressure on the government to fund it?

Bethell: The fact is, some biotech companies have been looking into this, and there’s one in particular whose stock price rose rapidly when it discovered stem cells in 1998. And then, in 2003, the stock price collapsed. I think they realized at that point, it was going to be a lot harder scientifically to do this than they had imagined. Then, you started to see all the ethical and religious objections being played up. When I was reading all these articles, I asked myself, why are they always focusing on the religious aspect and not the scientific issues? And I came to the conclusion that it was being played up deliberately to disguise the lack of scientific advance and the difficulties involved in coaxing embryonic stem cells into becoming pancreatic stem cells or whatever is needed to cure diabetes. They were nowhere near being able to do it, and they still are not.

Exclusive Human Events Interview: Journalist Busts Science Myths