{"article":{"id":167883,"heading":"Stem CellDebate In Senate This Week","author":"x","created":"2006-07-12 11:03:25","modified":"2013-11-11 00:41:30","last_modified":"Mon, 11 Nov 2013 07:41:30","article":"

Stem Cells are many times the product of aborted foetuses. The first

few paragraphs below are by bob geiger and his article at alternet is

nothing but a rant basically stating that anyone not in possession of

a degree is stupid.   He and his cloistered and complacent bunch were not even competent to observe ENMOD, and most of them are still not!  7 years + they have been sprayed upon daily and subjected to psychotronic mind control, and have gone merrily about their \"Learning\".  Oh well.  I include the

paragraph from bobs article because it states the situation in the

senate right now, as of today.

 The article below bobs paragraph, by Michael Cook, is much more

objective and informative, from Australia, and it addresses many of

the same issues that we are to deal with here in the USA.  The thing about all

this is:  bush and many of his type are invested to the teeth in

biotech, enmod, and stem cell research, etc., they are the mad

scientists of this generation.  I do not envy them their love of lucre

because that always makes it difficult to do the right thing, especially when they espouse the right thing, while acting 180 degrees out of phase with it!

It will be interesting to see what the GOP does with this hot potato.  The

other side of the federal reserve foreign powers in our government,

the democrats, at least can be honest about THIS, and doncha know they

are using it to the max.

This is being stepped on HARD by the press, I saw it on Google which

was advertising it at wired news, then went to wired it was REMOVED!

I went and posted at a place where some guys were giving me hell, I

think they are DHS, out of work and now paid to run boards for their

boy george....I just got all my posts and my membership banned at a

politics board for mentioning it!   Oh well.

b

------------------------------

Posted by Bob Geiger at 6:41 AM on July 10, 2006.

 After going zero for three in \"Wedge-Issue June,\" Senate Majority

Leader Bill Frist (R-TN) must have decided that it would look good on

his resume to actually get some meaningful legislation passed in the

109th Congress. This forced Frist before the July 4 recess to agree to

a deal with Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) that will on Monday

(Today-ed.) start a week of debating and voting on stem cell research

in the form of three bills now before the Senate.

----------------------------

STEM CELL RESEARCH

By Michael Cook

July 11, 2006

Two things blaze out with noonday clarity about embryos and their stem

cells: scientists appear to know almost everything, and the rest of us

fear we know almost nothing. In fact, since stem cell biology is such

a fast-moving field, all Australians - even other scientists - depend

completely on what we are fed by a few dozen stem cell specialists.

Radical changes to laws on reproductive technology, such as whether to

authorise therapeutic cloning, could emerge from this week's meeting

of the Council of Australian Governments meeting.

The proposal by those who want to liberalise the law is that

researchers should be allowed to create embryos, grow them for 14

days, and extract stem cells, thus killing the embryo.

In view of the tremendous financial potential of stem cell products

and the legal and ethical consequences of changing the status quo, any

proposed changes have to be scrutinised thoroughly. As Princeton

University president Shirley Tilghman has commented, \"Some of the

public pronouncements in the field of stem cell research come close to

over-promising at best and delusional fantasising at worst.\"

The Australian public - which would end up bankrolling this

controversial research - must be protected from huckstering. Here are

a few of the many questions that scientists should face about their

work:

- Progress towards therapeutic cloning requires women's eggs, probably

in vast numbers, yet donors are not supposed to be compensated.

Retrieving the eggs is a long, uncomfortable and potentially dangerous

procedure and it is unlikely that many women will volunteer. How,

then, will you source the eggs? In particular, do you plan to use

rabbit or cow eggs to create beings that are mostly human, but part

animal? Why hasn't any other country authorised this radical

procedure?

- Apart from their use as therapies, cloned embryos are said to be

needed for their insight into chronic genetic diseases, such as

Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, diabetes and muscular dystrophy. But isn't

it true that the emergence of these diseases during embryonic

development is only a hypothesis, not a certainty? In that case, would

you ask permission to grow embryos for longer than 14 days? How much

longer? As far as the end of the first trimester?

- If you are successful in developing a personal body repair kit using

the technique of therapeutic cloning, how much will this cure cost? US

scientists estimate it could be at least $A135,000. Would that be true

in Australia as well?



- The world's most famous cloner, Ian Wilmut, the scientist who cloned

Dolly the sheep, released a book last week in which he suggests that

therapeutic cloning should be used to create healthy designer babies.

Is this an outcome you would welcome?

- Cloning babies is the single possibility of reproductive technology

to which the public is adamantly opposed. Yet the Australian Academy

of Science, along with more than 60 of the world's leading science

academies, is a signatory to a declaration that a ban on human

reproductive cloning \"should be reviewed periodically in the light of

scientific and social developments\".

And last month the world's most prominent IVF body, the European

Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology, was only willing to

extend its moratorium on reproductive cloning for a single year. If

human reproductive cloning were safe, would it be ethical?

Korea's Hwang debacle, in which the world's most successful stem cell

scientist has been disgraced as a scientific fraud and put on trial

for embezzlement, shows a potential conflict of interest in embryo

research regulation.

On the one hand, scientists are both the gatekeepers for all of the

government's information and the recipients of the government's

funding. On the other hand, their work might be a bonanza for the

government. In the light of this, is the Lockhart report vigilant

enough? It proposes to leave embryo research in the hands of a

licensing committee that could approve innovative procedures without

consulting anyone.

Whenever I am compelled to play croquet, I cheat like blazes. I cannot

see why I should abide by the rules of a patently absurd game.

Embryonic stem cell researchers must feel a bit like that. For them

the human embryo is nothing more than a clump of cells. Why, then,

must they kowtow to the public and Parliament for permission? So their

storyline changes with every telling. The pole star shifts from

helping infertile couples, to curing Alzheimer's, to seeking the

origin of chronic diseases, to drug testing, depending on who is

listening. The beneficiaries, they say, will be healthy patients, or a

booming biotech industry, or blue-sky science.   story it takes

to get the laws and the funding they need.

Fair enough. It's a free country. But to prove their case they have to

present, not a jerry-built castle of half-truths and high hopes, but

the whole truth and a transparent agenda. Nothing less is good enough

to warrant a change in the law.

Michael Cook is editor of the bioethics newsletter BioEdge.

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