I think it was Mike Adams who was recently mocking atheists for their humorless, misplaced, and elevated sense of their own intellectual self-worth, while at the same time showing themselves to be the stupidest commentators in a debate.
Idiot: the "current" lines as you termed them -- which now number in the hundreds of additional lines able to be studied under NIH funding -- now include lines made from embryos that were KILLED since the lifting of the August 9, 2001 moratorium instituted by Bush.
Privately funded research on other varieties of embryonic stem-cell lines from embryos which HAVE BEEN and ARE BEING KILLED continues. The crime is that this atrocity continues outside of enacting US legislation to prevent it -- although given someone with your Mengelian world-view, one suspects that you're fine with that.
It is a moral crime that fertility clinics discard fertilized embryos, yet no law protects them at this point. Just because it is done legally now doesn't give anyone the justification for destroying them under the color of exploitative science informed as it is by the Haekelian evolutionary world-view.
Your position is one characterized by the expedient morality and exploitative materialism of the evolutionary world view as it is applied to the conduct of investigative science. One might fairly say you support the practice of a form of embryonic parasitism -- the embryo gives all, the Mengelians takes all.
Perhaps, although embryonic stem-cell research is far behind adult stem-cell research, as we don't even have a full complete human trial yet, it's impossible to tell.
Embryonic is far behind adult, because -- as any simpleton atheist should be able to grasp, but it continues to appear that your can't -- embryonic lines are wild types and experimentally unpredictable, where adult cells, again as previously noted are by contrast far more predictable.
In order to conduct valid human trials you have to be able to power the study sufficiently to be able to report results with statistical significance. In order to obtain Institutional Review Board approval for such studies, the studies have to credibly demonstrate that a specific therapeutic pre-determined clinical endpoint is likely to be achieved. Add to that the study must affirm patient safety.
Injecting or transplanting "wild types" of stem cells might have been considered legal to do on Jews and Gypsies in Nazi Germany at one time, and one suspects from your writing that whatever moral compass you have would have given a pass to the practice in the name of scientific advancement -- much as the Nazis had a habit of doing back then. Many of your pretend-scientist buddies over at "Darwin Central" might also be giddy with such a prospect, but in the US, the FDA would today deem such a thing to be patently unethical, and the practice would be disallowed from supporting a marketing application based upon a therapy derived from embryonic tissues in this way.
Your blithe ignorance of what constitutes the science behind credible, ethical therapeutic drug development is glimmeringly apparent.
FDA approval of therapeutic claims derived stem cells can only come from predictable models. You can call the FDA a "scam artist," but again this is only more evidence of the gaping knowledge void you manifest in the context of drug development.
I'm not claiming it will be fruitful...I am just saying that many of the arguments against it are based on ignorance.
The only scientifically ignorant not to mention ethically challenged poster on this thread is you.
That earlier illustration Eternal Vigilance made about the skin of Jews being used as lampshades is quite apropos.
