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To: GovernmentShrinker
Of course, this has also been found to be the case with adult stem cells, but one wouldn't expect to see that mentioned in an anti-embryonic stem cell rant.

Two things:

1. Do you have proof of this?

2. The FACT is that adult stem cells have produced significant breakthroughs with over SIX DOZEN conditions, while embyronic stem cell has had ZERO success.

12 posted on 01/08/2007 4:33:57 PM PST by wagglebee ("We are ready for the greatest achievements in the history of freedom." -- President Bush, 1/20/05)
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To: wagglebee

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?db=pubmed&cmd=Retrieve&dopt=AbstractPlus&list_uids=15833829&query_hl=1&itool=pubmed_docsum

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?itool=abstractplus&db=pubmed&cmd=Retrieve&dopt=abstractplus&list_uids=15833842

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?itool=abstractplus&db=pubmed&cmd=Retrieve&dopt=abstractplus&list_uids=16306013 ("BM" is bone marrow)

The info about adult stem cells was published in various science periodicals last year, and you'd know that if you didn't restrict your reading to extremely biased political sources. The findings weren't surprising to anyone familiar with the research on stem cells, since there was already a great deal of research implicating adult stem cells as a source of cancer development in their original owners. Any cell that can be coaxed into becoming any of a wide range of other types of cells -- i.e. any cell that has significant therapeutic potential -- is going to have some tumor-producing tendencies (note, however, that the tumors so far found to be produced by embryonic stem cells are almost entirely the non-malignant, easily curable teratomas). Research guided by science, rather than politics, will find solutions to these problems, probably more or less simultaneously with finding solutions to many challenges posed by cancers which do not originate from any type of transplanted stem cells.

As for "six dozen significant breakthroughs", you have to stretch the definition of a significant breakthrough to the breaking point to come up with that. This claim is not a "fact", but rather just another rant frequently made on political/religious activism sites, but absolutely nowhere to be found in scientific literature. Actual researchers who are working with adult stem cells aren't making nearly the wildly enthusiastic claims for their results as anti- embryonic stem cell activists are making. There are lots of "significant breakthroughs" with embryonic stem cells to, as long your criteria don't require a clearly successful treatment in human patients for a condition that has had no other previous successful treatments -- but then again, there are very few adult stem cell therapies that even come close to meeting that definition, even though research on adult stem cells has been unrestricted and received liberal amounts of feceral funding. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2005/10/051012084443.htm

What we really should be focusing on is the whole misguided, unconstitutional notion that the federal government should be funding any sort of medical research that isn't directly related to national security and/or genuinely PUBLIC health issues -- i.e. readily communicable diseases like flu, polio, smallpox (NOT AIDS!), and bioterrorism agents -- and I have yet to hear of any educated speculation that any potential stem cell-derived therapies fit into those categories. It so typical of the religious right to claim to want small government, but then to want exceptions whenever it advances their pet issues. It doesn't bode well for a return to Constitutional government, when "conservatives" are energetically demanding that federal funding be reserved for what THEY want and withheld from what they don't want, rather than demanding that the federal government get its nose out of things it has no business being involved in at all.


14 posted on 01/08/2007 7:25:46 PM PST by GovernmentShrinker
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