Quote:That's perfect! It doesn't even involed embryonic stem cells!
Yeah. It's encouraging to see new avenues such as this one opening up.
Here's a pretty well-balanced piece from Newsday:
Quote:Stem-cell policy moderately wrong
Why didn't Bush outright prohibit the research, if he truly believed destroying embryos is killing?
BY RAMESH PONNURU
Ramesh Ponnuru is a senior editor at the National Review. This is from the Los Angeles Times.
August 24, 2004
On Aug. 9, 2001, President George W. Bush announced he would fund research only on those stem-cell lines taken from human embryos before that date. Bush's critics claimed he had sold out to the religious extremists in his party.
But in a curious way, it's the moderation of his policy that has exposed him to the strongest intellectual attacks.
Critics have said his funding policy is too restrictive. But they ignore what Bush did not do: He did not outright prohibit the research, which would seem to be the obvious thing to do if he really believed that human embryos are human beings and that destroying them, by taking their stem cells, is a kind of killing.
He did not regulate fertility clinics to make sure that they too refrained from destroying embryos. He did not even cut off funding altogether.
These omissions opened the door to Bush's opponents. His policies have been called inconsistent or even hypocritical. Bush's failure to take a tougher position on destroying embryos allegedly shows that his policy is not morally serious, but rather a gesture to his base - and one that comes at the expense of all the sick people who could some day benefit from more research.
It's been hard even for Bush's allies to articulate a defense of the policy. What, after all, is the difference between taking stem cells from a human embryo on Aug. 8, 2001, and performing the same act on Aug. 10, 2001? Yet only the first set of stem cells is eligible for federal funding under Bush's policy.
The demand for perfect consistency should not, however, exclude the possibility of political prudence.
A president who is a foe of abortion can reasonably decide for the time being to largely leave alone well-entrenched evils, such as common fertility clinic practices, while combating new evils to which the country is not yet accustomed - especially if the predictable consequence of tying the issues together would be defeat on both.
It would be a curious sort of principle of political morality that required people who held it to act in self-defeating ways.
Bush's policy is also defensible as a way of avoiding complicity with evils that cannot be prohibited. By limiting the research subsidies to stem cells taken before the subsidies were announced, he does not reward or induce more embryo destruction.
At the same time, he declines to make taxpayers who strongly object to the embryo-killing research pay for it.
Bush's task is a difficult one. He has had to engage in a debate about the early embryo. In contrast, on abortion, Supreme Court decisions spared politicians from having to do much more than posture.
Discussion of embryo research forces us all to go back to first principles: What is the early-stage human embryo? What are its claims on us?
Supporters of the research say the embryo is, uniquely, the potential source of medical miracles, though it itself is morally insignificant. It has no human characteristics, no eyes or ears or limbs.
The other side says that, to the contrary, the embryo has the characteristics of human beings at that stage of development.
A person could both support legal abortion and oppose embryo-destroying research, on the theory that the interests of the pregnant woman in the first case makes a decisive difference.
But the court's abortion rulings have conditioned our thinking about the embryo debate. It made the contention that early-stage embryos are not human beings much more plausible to many people.
It made many people think that it is somehow untoward for politicians to talk about the sanctity of early human life. And they forced abortion opponents into the sort of inconsistencies we are now seeing.
It is a little odd for them to be fighting to protect 1-day-old human embryos when it is possible, legally, to kill 8-month old human fetuses. But abortion foes are not responsible for that fact.
In this situation, Bush has a delicate task of persuasion and incremental change - of nudging the country toward greater respect for the principle that early human lives deserve legal protection.
Bush has not always done a perfect job of this: His handlers seem to have spent much of the last year wishing the stem-cell issue would just go away without their having to engage it.
He has, perhaps, not looked hard enough for additional ways to reach morally sound compromises. But his critics should not pretend his policy is more extreme than it is, or worse, use his moderation to damn him.
http://www.newsday.com/news/opinion/ny-vppon243940646aug24,0,1015185.story?coll=ny-viewpoints-headlines
Regardless of what the current policy is, it seems this issue is going to grow by leaps and bounds in the coming years. Perhaps a discussion on what the policy
should be is in order?
Cycloptichorn
Cycloptichorn wrote:
Quote:
BY RAMESH PONNURU
Ramesh Ponnuru is a senior editor at the National Review. This is from the Los Angeles Times.
August 24, 2004
<snip>
Bush has not always done a perfect job of this: His handlers seem to have spent much of the last year wishing the stem-cell issue would just go away without their having to engage it.
He has, perhaps, not looked hard enough for additional ways to reach morally sound compromises. But his critics should not pretend his policy is more extreme than it is, or worse, use his moderation to damn him.
http://www.newsday.com/news/opinion/ny-vppon243940646aug24,0,1015185.story?coll=ny-viewpoints-headlines
Regardless of what the current policy is, it seems this issue is going to grow by leaps and bounds in the coming years. Perhaps a discussion on what the policy
should be is in order?
Cycloptichorn
I agree, CycloP. This is simply not going to go away. The research is going to continue, with or without the U.S's involvement in the leading edge of science. Do Americans want to be involved to some degree? Will they refuse to accept treatment that results from this research?
There are so many questions that people need to answer - for themselves, and their countries.
Californians to Vote on Spending $3 Billion on Stem Cell
Research
By JOHN M. BRODER and ANDREW POLLACK
California, in an act of rebellion against the White House,
may be on the verge of spending $300 million a year in each
of the next 10 years on stem cell research.
story
I find this thread to be rather telling.
We debated, reached a pretty agreeable consensus, and then it dies for a while.
So I call out again: any opines on what our stem-cell policies should be?
Cycloptichorn
research should be done until it can be demonstrated that the effects can be reproduced, reliably, with a high degree of certainty and repeatedly on non-humans. Then, once that is done, and the basics of research have been fulfilled, Human stem cells should be used.
Good call.
I wonder if our genetically close cousins (apes, pigs and such) could actually have their stem cells used in humans? It doesn't seem like a huge strech to me; I know pig organs are being transplanted to humans these days, and this isn't that much of a strech.
At some point, though, we are going to have to do research on human stem cells. IF we cannot find a way to harvest them other than from embryonic sources, is there ever going to be a morally and ethically correct way of harvesting said cells?
So many questions. I try to think of appropriate answers, but I just keep thinking of my grandfather, who didn't even know he was alive by the end, and I can see why people are in a hurry to find out a solution...
Cycloptichorn
Yet another reason to persue stem cell research. Are all you who are staunchly for Bush Listening?
Oct 7, 3:34 PM EDT
Study: Stem Cells Emit Healing Molecules
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Embryonic stem cells may not have to actually grow replacement body parts to be useful.
New research suggests these cells also secrete healing molecules powerful enough to reverse a lethal birth defect in mice.
Stem cell specialists praised the surprise discovery by scientists at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. The study was reported Thursday in the journal Science.
The "exciting new study ... expands the potential therapeutic repertoire" of embryonic stem cells, said Dr. Kenneth Chien of the University of California, San Diego.
Embryonic stem cells are master cells that can form into any tissue of the body. Many scientists believe harnessing them might one day allow tissue regeneration to treat numerous diseases.
The Sloan-Kettering experiment suggests an additional role.
Researchers injected stem cells directly into the embryos of mice destined to develop heart defects so severe that the mice would die in the womb. Half the mice were born with healthy hearts.
"We were surprised these (mice) were born and they were normal," lead researcher Deigo Fraidenraich said.
Yet few of the stem cells actually grew into healthy heart tissue. Instead, the researchers found that the stem cells secreted certain molecules that signaled nearby heart cells to make changes, repairing the defects developing in those tissues. Fraidenraich called the secretions "rescue factors."
Chien, reviewing the findings in Science, said scientists now should test whether such molecules also might treat adult heart disease.
Israeli Stem-Cell Research Heals Hearts
21:42 Oct 03, '04 / 18 Tishrei 5765
A successful Israeli experiment has injected stem-cells into the failing hearts of pigs to correct faulty heart rhythms.
The study, reported by Israel21c, raises hopes that the method will eventually serve to enable natural biological pacemakers.
Heart disease is a leading cause of death worldwide. Heart attacks cause tissue to be permanently destroyed when blood is temporarily cut off to sections of the heart.
The implications of the Israeli study could eventually result in relief for the hundreds of thousands of people around the world who now use artificial pacemakers to regulate their hearts. Pacemakers are typically inserted because the normal rhythm-generating cells work irregularly, or because they have a break in the cell system of the heart used to spread the natural pacemaking nerve signal.
The Israeli experiment used human embryonic stem cells, taken from five-day-old embryos, which have the ability to grow into almost all of the hundreds of kinds of cells in the body. Researchers are currently focused on discovering methods of integrating stem-cells to regenerate various organs.
The research team from Israel’s Technion Institute of Science, which was headed by Prof. Lior Gepstein of the Bruce and Ruth Rappaport Institute of Medical Sciences at the Technion Faculty of Medicine, and including leading stem cell researcher Prof. Joseph Itskovitz-Eldor of Rambam Medical Center's obstetrics and gynecology department, showed that the cardiomyocytes (heart muscle cells) created from tiny human embryos integrated functionally into the pigs' hearts.
"This has been a long process," Gepstein told Israel21c. "Our first step was generating cell types from stem cells in the lab. We then succeeded in generating heart cells a few years ago. The next step was not only to generate but to show that these cells could function in vivo, and integrate with other networks of cells, and we have now done that."
"This is extremely important research," David Gutterman, associate director of the Cardiovascular Research Center at the Medical College of Wisconsin in Milwaukee said. "This could lead to a replacement of the mechanical pacemaker, which requires surgery to replace the battery every few years. We could also replace beating cells in patients who have had heart attacks."
