Posted on 03/03/2009 1:11:12 PM PST by Coleus
The problem is that they haven't been that successful in earlier trials on animals. It will be interesting to see how they do in human clinical trials.
The best thing about adult stem cells is that they can be taken from other parts of the patient's own body, precluding the need for a lifetime of taking anti-rejection drugs
LOL!
Yeah, right. Are you really drinking that Kool-Aid, or are you thinking people reading this are dumb enough to believe that they are approving human trials with poor success on animals?
Embryos are not remotely analogous to bread because they are persons, not physical resources. But let's instead use the analogy of looted antiquities (goods which, like human embryos, are of incommensurable value but were wrongly obtained to begin with.) You can't exchange - trade - barter - sell looted antiquities because it is unethical as well as illegal to receive remuneration or to profit from them. The sense of this is that if profit is allowed to occur, it creates a perverse incentive to go out and loot some more.
The analogy works, but is imperfect, chiefly because embryos have, intrinsically, a far higer ontological status than antiquities. They cannot be treated as YOUR property, a RESEARCHER's property, or anybody's property, because they are not property at all. They are human beings; as such, created equal in fundamental rights to Gondring and Mrs. Don-o.
The law at present treats them as property, but that only shows how abysmally corrupt our law has become.
We are not facing a huge array of permissible alternatives. There are only two: if the embryos are viable, they must be preserved until they can be implanted. If they are not viable (dead) they require the respectful disposition appropriate for any other human remains.
Two more points on the lack of successful therapeutic applications derived from ESCR: first, you have (as you mentioned) repeatedly asserted that such applications have been demonstrated in vivo, but have never been kind enough to document this assertion. Second, the vanishingly remote hopes referred to by the two people quoted in the WSJ are especialy persuasive because they are themselves dependent on research funds -- that's their income stream --- and so for THEM to say ~but really, folks, these hopes are [ahem] a long, long time from now and far, far away ~ means, to the rest of us, hey, this is not the most promising venue for medical progress.
Sincerely interested in your documentation.
Yes, but if I profit off of their death healthwise or moneywise, I am profiting from MURDER, which will only beget more MURDER.
Here’s a question for you, what if your in utero child or grandchild was in the womb and the government made you kill the child for it’s stem cells because he had some genetic strength?
Although embryonic stem cells have not WORKED, it is all about people playing God. They think they can control the weather and they think they can cure all disease and soon they’ll be picking choosing which children can be born based on their genetic make-up. Then we’ll be back to forced sterilizations or as in China forced abortion. The slippery slop will soon be vertical and we will all fall off the cliff.
Stranger things have happened. Have they solved the problems of runaway tumors that were so prevalent in the trials on animals? I’ve not read anything that says they have.
Here’s the add that should have been run.
Results of adult stem cell..List the cures.
Results for embryonic stem cells: Cancer.
These rats did not get tumors...
By early summer, a handful of patients with severe spinal cord injuries will be eligible for injections of specialized nerve cells designed to enable electrical signals to travel between the brain and the rest of the body. When the cells were administered to rats that had lost control of their hind legs, they regained the ability to walk and run, albeit with a limp.
[...]
The cell therapy is made from one of the first batches of human embryonic stem cells ever created. Researchers had feared those cells could never be used to treat people because they were derived using molecules from mice and cows and thus might be rejected by the human immune system. Newer stem cell lines that are animal-free have not been eligible for federal research funding under the policy set by President Bush in 2001. As a result, many people had expected FDA approval for any embryonic stem cell therapy to be years away.
Now, however, the FDA appears satisfied that the stem cells are safe for human use, and more clinical trials are sure to follow, said Amy Comstock Rick, president of the Coalition for the Advancement of Medical Research, a patient advocacy group that supports stem cell research. "It shows that things are starting to move through the pipeline," she said.
I’m Baptist, and agree with the Catholic Church which has always been against in vitro fertilization and the freezing and storing of our children of tomorrow.
So, you believe that 2 wrongs make a right?
Virtually every “success” of embryonic stem cells in animals and in the lab have been achieved, first, in adult stem cells. Way behind the times, always.
As is President Obama, with his determination to fund embryo destruction for more behind-the-times research.
Using the Bush-Policy approved lines, we found out that Oct 4 was vital to the reprogramming. Wow! We knew that from the murine lines!
iPSC research is only “based on embryonic stem cell research” because of the behind-the-times-assumption that it’s necessary to reprogram the cells all the way back to the embryo. As well as the determination to use human stem cells, rather than the animal models.
Also, for some reason, the gold standard is seen as the ability to achieve embryonic-like stem cells, rather than the ability to achieve functional cells and tissues.
We keep hearing about “basic research” into the molecular basis of the disease - like diabetes, Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s are expressed in the embryo! How likely are they to be expressed in tissue cultures?
Functional cells and tissues, and the local factors that act on *them* will hold the key to etiology as it has to treatment.
Wait, you’re saying that it’s cutting edge news that the new embryos created at Harvard or California from solicited oocytes and sperm?
Singapore has been throwing money hand over fist at embryonic stem cell research. That wasn’t enough? Are you saying that $3 Billion in California, $250 million in Houston, all that money at Harvard, South Korea, the UK, were just not enough additional funding and opportunities over and above the millions the NIH has allocated for the currently approved embryonic stem cell lines?
Well, perhaps if all the money spent so far can’t show us nearly the results that adult stem cell has — much less the hoped for successes from iPSC’s — perhaps we don’t need to throw good money after bad.
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