Stem cell reasearch

Pope Denounces Stem Cell Work
Pope Denounces Stem Cell Work
11/11/03

VATICAN CITY: Pope John Paul II on Monday dennounced as "morally contradictory" any medical treatment based on stem cells taken from embryo tissue.

In a speech to scientists Monday, the pope said research with stem cell technology "has understandably grown in importance in recent years because of the hope it offers for the cure of ills affecting many people."

John Paul suffers from Parkinson's disease, one of the ailments that might benefit from stem cell research. However, he reiterated the Vatican position that "stem cells for purposes of experimentation or treatment cannot come from human embryo tissue."

Vatican teaching holds that life begins at conception.

I don't give a flying **** what the vatican thinks about anything. It's nothing but a safe haven for paedophiles

The Pope can stick it in his ear along with his tenth century morality. I do not think he or any other religious leader should impose his religious values upon others. Let him stay where he belongs ministering to his own flock.
Are we not handicapped enough having Ayatollah Bush as president?

Thank You Ayatollah Bush
U.S. stem cell line deemed too risky

Use of federally approved stem cells unethical, panel finds


ASSOCIATED PRESS

BALTIMORE, Nov. 11 — A medical ethics panel said Monday it would be unethical and risky to treat people with the embryonic stem cells approved by President Bush for federally funded research. The approved cell lines, created for possible future disease treatments, were initially grown on mouse cells. That could expose humans to an animal virus their immune systems couldn’t fight, the panel said. The experts said that safer stem cell lines now exist, but those would not be eligible for federal funding.

http://www.msnbc.com/news/991813.asp

I disagree with Bush's stance, of course.

However, I wonder if he doesn't want to let the research continue "under the table", so to speak.

He assuages the Religious Right by officially making it illegal.

But what does he do to enforce the ban? I suspect little.

So people "fib" on their grant applications about what kind of stem cells they are using. They get the grants.

With little enforcement, nobody really knows anything.

Then, when real progress happens, what is the Religious Right to do? If somebody cures a disease using stem cells, are Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell going to go on TV and say, "This cure is wrong! Those people should die because the cure was developed using stem cells, which are abortion in action!".

I doubt they will. Who wants to be against a cure for a disease?

I suspect Bush is trying to have it both ways here. I suspect he really wants stem cell research to continue, and is surreptitiously letting it do so.

Please don't kid yourself. Bush has done a great dis-service to science and to the American people because he and his ilk are stuck in a bible bound bog of ignorance. Thus has it ever been for his kind and there is no 'under the table' science.
First, have you ever filled out a grant request? There's no space for 'fibbing'. There is a whole class of people now who make their living writing grant requests for artists, engineers and others, those poor schlubs who haven't the ability or knowledge to speak bureaucrat. One might be able to spread the rhetoric a little thick when asking for funding for a children's theatre project, but all the science grants have to be vetted from a number of sources, especially those that deal with disease.

Secondly, science doesn't really work in miracle cures, flash-bang finds and the like. It goes in baby steps. In stem cell research, the medical scientists would have to do a large number of long and short trials on patients who have been selected based on specific criteria (length and severity of condition, specific condition aspects, other non-related illnesses or circumstances.) Then those results have to be analysed and published so that others, following the same procedures used can attempt to duplicate those results.

Third, even when you get what you think it a miracle cure, it seldom is. Consider Interferon, discovered in 1957, not approved for clinical use till 1987, but when it was, it made all the covers of the major news magazines as a cure-all. Scientists demurred on the cure-all part and they were right. There is some effective use in hepatitis and MS but as a cure for cancer there is still much work to be done. Article : http://www3.mdanderson.org/~oncolog/14_Interferon.html

What I'm saying it that this will be a long process and ought to proceed unfettered.

What Bush has done at the bequest of the same people who have opposed every movement towards medical progress from blood transfusions to vaccines is smear vaseline on the lens of American microscopes. Stem cell research will have to done with private funds over the long term and if you think it's difficult to get funding from the federal government, try writing a grant request to people who want a return on their investment in five years or less while informing them that it may take ten years just to get tentative results.

Joe

I am against any politician who would hamstring the advancement of science. I am also against a politician who would use his religious dictates as a rationale for his decisions.

This is about as polite a way that I could express what I am feeling now.

Stem cell research won't be stopped. It just won't be done in the US. Those countries which don't let it progress will force their researchers to go to nations that do. And eventually you'll end up having to pay a lot more for the treatments discovered.

Despite Bush and his fundamentalist constituents stem cell research will continue. Unfortunately not in the US. That will delay but not stop the reaping of benefits from that research. It will however, to the detriment of future medical breakthroughs, manage to drive the best and the brightest out of the US.
How much better this world would be without the encumbrance of religion.

Stem cell research will surely have some interesting outcomes, but for the most part, along with the Human Genome Project, it's a whole lot of hot air. Humans have a wonderful, sometimes amusing, way of overestimating our capabilities...

Here's an expression to help you understand why you are finding it hard to find any REAL advances in health having to do with genomics:

"The map is not the territory."



hahahha ... apparently you don't work in the research field .... hahahah.



"cancer" is an umbrella term for about 30,000 different diseases so indeed painting the term with a single brush of a cure is really nonsense.

So Kelticwizard is correct when he says that stem cell research on unapproved lines can, and is, being done covertly in the USA? And that that was Bush's plan all along?

Joe Nation



Bush and plans. I would say the two are mutually exclusive.

all very true, wenchi, but without the 'map' the search for buried treasure is simply wandering in fog; at least now we have some landmarks.

and, science has allways had to battle against the quivering ranks of the "blessed" to bring real hope to the 'unclean' masses.

Yes, what Bo said.