Laura Bush vs. Science

It's John Candy, a canadian who fled to the US.

... one of the most touching tributes came later that year when his beloved Toronto Argonauts opened their 1994 season with a ceremony retiring his number, 91.

All the more reason for Bush to place the ban? So only the wealthy have access to the medical advancements since it would be private rather than public...

Just a thought.

Personally, I'd provide the fertilized egg myself if I or a family member needed an organ.

Bear!!!! I think we're talking science, morals and saving lives here, not sex.

He's just put restrictions on government funded research. Private researchers can do what they want as long as they're not using the taxpayer money."

Sounds good to me.

squinney wrote:

Bear!!!! I think we're talking science, morals and saving lives here, not sex.

just trying to do my part to help......I resent your implication.....<<Harumpph>>

so the bear gets big on the want to and small on the can do. we all have a bear to cross.

What people like karzak are attempting to do is stop this basic research.

Research is still allowed, using existing stem cells which can be reproduced.

From http://www.religioustolerance.org/res_stem9.htm
Quote:
A number of scientists who were interviewed expressed confusion over Bush's statement that there are 60 existing stem cell lines. They believed that there are perhaps only about a dozen lines. Some are owned by private labs and are unlikely to make them available to government research programs. "Even specialists in the field had been unaware there were more than 10 or 15 lines." 3 "The National Institutes of Health has yet to produce information about the lines or their producers, feeding speculation that many of those 60 do not exist, are of poor quality or are under such tight commercial control as to make them unattractive to researchers hoping to study and perhaps profit from them."

The Washington Post and other news organizations have compiled their own lists of stem cell lines. None have come up with more than 23. However, on 2001-AUG-27, the National Institutes of Health stated that they had found 64 cell lines from "genetically diverse" embryos. However, according to USA Today, "As many as 30 cell lines don't show all of the chemical and biological characteristics needed for the widest possible use." 4 They are located in laboratories around the world: 24 lines in two Swedish labs, 20 lines in four U.S. labs, 10 lines in two Indian labs, 6 lines in one Australian lab, and 4 lines in one Israeli lab. All lines were derived from embryos that meet President Bush's criteria.

Researchers have many other concerns:

The available cells may not contain sufficient genetic diversity to allow meaningful research and treatment. In order to avoid organ rejection, doctors try to match the DNA of the donor and recipient. This requires that many stem cell lines be available.
The limited racial diversity of the available cells could affect the availability of future therapies for certain racial minorities. Many of the existing stem cell lines come from Oriental people. "Kevin Wilson, director of public policy at the American Society for Cell Biology, said many researchers believe 'there is a question about the quality of the [64] cell lines and if they are of sufficient genetic diversity for scientists to do the work that needs to be done.' "
Cell lines are "highly finicky...Cell lines can 'crash' -- or die -- at any moment." "NBC's Robert Bazell has reported that existing stem-cell colonies were believed to have a 'shelf life' of only about two years. But Leon Kass, a University of Chicago bioethicist heading a Bush-appointed panel monitoring stem-cell research, said the existing lines should last at least a decade." 5
Some stem cells that successfully grow in one laboratory, cannot be grown in another.
Stem cells are "quite volatile...They can spontaneously turn into specialized cells, thus rendering them useless for later work."
The NIH has not released full information on the condition of the 60 cell lines.
According to the Washington Post, most, perhaps all, of the existing embryonic stem cell lines have been mixed with mouse cells. "The cell colonies, or 'lines,' were created for early-stage research with no thought that they would become the only embryonic cells eligible for federal money. The standard technique for creating human embryonic stem cell lines has been to extract cells from inside a microscopic embryo, then grow them atop embryonic mouse cells, known as "feeder" cells. The latter excrete some unknown nutritional or growth factor that helps the human cells stay healthy. Because they have been in close contact with mouse cells, the human cells pose a small but real risk of transferring potentially deadly animal viruses to people." Because of Food and Drug Administration guidelines, it would be difficult or impossible to use the cells in human clinical tests. The total number of stem cell lines usable in human clinical trials may well be not 60 as the president indicated, but zero! The available sources of stem cells are not of proven usefulness. Referring to the stem cells at Goteborg University in Sweden, a Washington Post writer said: "At least one-third of the 64 embryonic stem cell colonies approved for funding under a new Bush administration policy are so young and fragile it remains unclear whether they will ever prove useful to scientists." Goteborg neurobiologist Peter ErikssonI said: "I was a little surprised to see the NIH calling them 19 lines. Maybe they misinterpreted a little bit." Firuza Parikh, founder and director of Reliance Life Sciences in India, said that four of the seven cell lines included in the NIH list have barely cleared the first hurdles in the long process of proving their identity and usefulness as stem cells. The three remaining lines are even younger and could easily "peter out."

It seemed obvious that the President's policy was only a stop-gap measure. Sooner or later, the existing stem cell lines will be exhausted, and government research will have to grind to a stop, unless the extraction of new stem cells are allowed. Paul Elias of the Associated Press interviewed stem cell researchers one year after the President's decision. He reported that researchers complained: "An overwhelming majority of the stem cells the Bush administrated approved are in poor condition and useless for research. In the meantime, some restricted research can proceed. But if new cures or treatments are developed, they may not be useable by some racial minorities.

"To limit researchers to 60 cell lines, critics say, is like telling mathematicians they can pursue their studies but they can never use numbers bigger than 10. 'I think it's a ridiculous policy,' said George Daley, a leading stem cell researcher at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research in Cambridge," MA. Evan Snyder, another stem cell expert at the Harvard Medical School, called Bush's approach 'scientifically naive.' "