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Embryonic Stem Cell Research Legalized in California
Stigmata669 writes "Against the wishes of the White House, it appears that Gov. Gray Davis has passed legislation to legalize embryonic stem cell research in California. The article sheds some light on the nature of this decision, and highlights the difference between this decision, and the continued ban on human cloning in California."
I think he summed this up very well when he said
"We've had a severe violation of the separation of church and state in the handling of what to do about this emerging technology,"
and
"There are religious groups - the Jehovah's Witnesses, I believe - who think it's a sin to have a blood transfusion. Well, what if the president for some reason decided to listen to them, instead of to the Catholics, which is the group he really listens to in making his decisions about embryonic stem cell research?" Reeve says. "Where would we be with blood transfusions?"
from The Guardian
What Dubya did, was merely to attempt to please the Church more than he otherwise could (he could issue an all-out ban), but as a previous slashdot story has shown, his decision was just the "middle-ground" front he wanted to show to the public, and try not to alienate either side. He said, researchers can't use federal money on stem cell research on embryos other than those already started. Through the back, he snuck in a clause that said, as long as the embryos were obtained using private money, the rest can be done with federal money. (Kind of like saying: You can't have sweatshops in the US, but go crazy in Mexico, and we'll even drop the tarrifs!)
As for Davis' move, he's always been on the left. He doesn't care about alienating the Catholic Church, since they're generally against him anyhow. I'm sure this was also a publicity grab. He's lost a lot of the support he used to have across the state, and he's facing a much closer election than he's faced in many years (against Bill Simon). If you are anywhere near CA, you can smell the mud as it flies through the air at either candidate. Maybe I'm wrong, but this is an issue that has been around for some time, and signing it now is absolutely perfect timing for suporting his campaign.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
As this article will probably have attracted some researchers with an interest in neural repair, this seems like a good opportunity to ask the following questions:
What's the state of the art when it comes to replacing brain tissue ? Are there any reasons to believe that newly added neurons can or cannot migrate to correct sites, achieve the correct functional state, and make the appropriate connections ?
Why only two cheers? Because despite its advanced society, huge technical capabilities and social progressiveness, California has failed as yet to shoulder its world-wide policing responsibilities to bring about regime change in backward, religious fundamentalist places like Washington and Florida.
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
Bush only issued a ban on federal funds being used for embryonic stem cell research. There was no effect on private resarch, nor, to my knowledge, state funded research.
It also seems that Bush only took that position to appease some of the religious conservatives whose support he enjoys...
-- -- Warning. Do not stare directly at the sun.
As much as I support this legislation, the article was flawed when it said of Christopher Reeve:
"Reeve has said he has regained some feeling in his fingers and toes and urges further stem cell research as a way to treat paralysis."
Which would seem to indicate that he has somehow already benefitted from step cell research. AFAIK, he hasn't. His recovery so far has been almost entirely the result of physical therapy. The cause of stem cell research is harmed by inaccurate reporting, even when it seems to support the cause. Objectivity and honesty are the only way to go. Let the other side make the unproven, irrational claims. In the long run they will lose the fight.
The ability to arrive at a sound moral decision plays on a delicate balance of faith and reason. Some people only know how to do one or the other and thus arrive on one side of the fence without understanding how other people can disagree.
The majority of the Slashdot community includes people who are able to think objectively and logically. So it's not surprising to see most of these arguments here. Perhaps we could apply that same reason and thought to the opposing view? There must be some reason why a mass of people would oppose stem cell research...
But I'm not the guy to answer that.
I still don't get it when people explain the existence of God with "just because."
is not stem cell research, but in using unborn humans as a source for those stem cells. The church has no qualms about stem cell research so long as acquiring the stem cells does not mean killing an unborn human being.
What the Church really fears is a time in which humans will be "grown" for their organs - that is to provide healthy organs for sick people. Using embryonic stem cells for research is not a trivial step in that direction.
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
Not to engage in the dead-horse debate about abortion, it's important for people to realize there are *two* sides in the argument. Bush happens to be on the side the believes that a fetus has the spark of human life, and the rest of the position follows from that. If you want to argue whether or not that's the case, I don't want to hear it because it has nothing to do with the fact it's part of Bush's philosophy.
Now, having that point of view, how can people that would roundly condemn Nazi medical experiments blame Bush for taking a position that acknowledges the other side, but refuses to give support to medical experimentation that results from a practice he believes to be immoral? Or should morality be completely removed from politics?
particularly large segment of the American population or their beliefs.
This is irrelevant, with respect to the argument of separation of
church and state. 200 Years ago it was the majority view in the south
that blacks were inferior and hence the concept of slavery was valid.
We look back on that now with revulsion. So then if the majority view
cannot over ride the documents that define the nation. Simply put, the US
has a constitution that defines how the church and state interact.
The issue of embriotic destruction is a religious one and should not
be federally precluded.
Your comment has a few flawed ideas.
:)
1) While you commments about doing what you want with your body are partly correct, you miss the fact, that a) we're not talking about our bodies - we talking about the body of a human being. A child. A genetically identical to you and me life., and b) we can only do what we want with our bodies as long as it doesn't harm the rest of the society. Murdering our children has significant social impact.
2) There's nothing wrong with preserving our species, but the whole point of this debate is that we're killing children in order to preserve ourselves. We're eliminating new life in order to squeeze a few more years out of the old ones. Seems rather inconsistant to me.
Louis Pasteur prooved over 100 years ago that life doesn't come from non life. Life passes seemlessly from the mother and father into a child. Never does life stop and that zygote is just as human as you are (except that it wants to preserve life).
If you want to experiment why don't you donate your living body to be hacked apart in the name of science
Flame on!
-Gallamine
RobotBox - Robot projects from around the world
I kind of have a problem destroying a perfectly good embryo for the sake of scientific research.
I consider enbryos life to the extent that, hey I was an embryo once, you all were. Taking that enybros chance at life away is like someone taking your chance to live away now. But others beg to differ and that's okay.
It all boils down to how the process is done.
The bill requires clinics that do in-vitro fertilization procedures to inform women they have the option to donate discarded embryos to research. It requires written consent for donating embryos for research and bans the sale of embryos.
So in other words if the fertilization doesn't work right and/or the enbryo hasn't a chance for life, the women who go there now have the option to donate that embryo for research? Am _I_ reading this right?
From the sounds of it, the embryo is just going to be tossed out anyway. Assuming i'm not reading the article wrong, this sounds perfectly fine with me.
If it's about an option to donate eggs to a fertilization clinic to grow an embryo in a test tube to harvest for research, then it's no so clear to me. But i guess since these people are giving up their sperm and eggs, that's their right, they're the owners of them. I wouldn't say it's okay or wrong, I'm just not sure if I'd do it personally. I'm netrual about it.
A Penny for my thoughts? Here's my two cents. I got ripped off!
It is pure arrogance that the people of California think they should be able to govern themselves, especially if it involves defying our leader in a post-9/11 world. Besides, after Bush's landslide election, it is clear that his deep and well-considered philosophy has a mandate.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Just like California's medical marijuana laws and their opposition by the federal government, this can also be seen as an issue of....drumroll please.... tate's rights. I see it as quite an interesting way to bring the issue of state's rights to the fore, as the people who normally bang on about state's rights all the time (conservatives) are exactly the people who will HATE these two laws. It's quite interesting to see how (for some of them) their belief in the sovereignty of the states completely evaporates when the states are doing something THEY don't like. I'd like to point out that I said SOME of them, as I know there are people out there on both sides of the political spectrum who honestly believe that states should have sovereignty in most issues that won't flip-flop in this situation. I'm just saying that I know for a fact that there are a LOT that have.
If you want to see why I think pharma was pivotal in this move, check out the auction site.
-I like my women like I like my tea: green-
Things Anti- embryonic Stem cell research folks say:
Anti: But it's a human being! A microscopic brainless little human being and taking cells from it is murder!
Pro: No, it's a mass of generic totipotent cells. If it makes it into a mother's womb, it might (about 1/2 fail to implant) become twins, triplets, or it might merge with another blastula to form a single individual. Or it might fail to implant and be expelled as waste. If we start declaring that fertilized eggs are human beings, do we then investigate every woman who has an early miscarriage for suspicion of murder or neglect (too much excercise, coffee or stress can cause a zygote to fail to implant)?
Better to stick with our current definition of "human being": unique individual of the human species, rather than redefine human being to mean one or more or part of something that might become a human being if inserted in the right environment just to try and get a leg up in the battle agains the pro-choicers.
Anti: Adult stem cells are providing cures while the liberals want to waste money on embryonic work just to upset the religious!
Pro: Unipotent adult stem cells were discovered over fifty years ago, and only recently have treatments with them become safe and effective. Yet such treatments are frequently claimed by anti-embryonic stem cell folks to be proof that adult _pluripotent_ stem cells will be effective, even though no human trials have been conducted with adult pluripotent stem cells to justify this claim!
Sadly, one can easily make the claim that adult stem cell research is a good thing without lying about embryonic stem cells research and therapeutic cloning. I wonder why folks who are interested in ASCR seem to constantly have to attack ESCR and SCNT? Doesn't their field of interest hold enough promise without cutting down the others?
In an ideal world, where curing sick people came first, all three avenues would be fully explored for the best cures.
Often the above is accompanied by something like:
Anti: Adult stem cells are currently healing hearts from only a few injections!
Pro: One form of disease has been alieviated in one patient. There has been no widespread set of human trials to show this will work in all cases, nor has there been comparative studies to see if this one method is better than methods using SCNT or ESCR. There is no scientific reason not to explore multiple methods for treatment to find the best one for various different forms of disease. Surgury stops some cancers, taxol stops others. It would be rather silly and unscientific to say since surgery is 70% effective agains cancer A, we should not fund other forms of cancer research, wouldn't it?
Anti: This research will lead to growing children for body parts!
Pro: No, that is not at all likely, even aside from the moral implications, it would be impractical. Instead, the specific needed organ cells are grown in the numbers required from pluripotent stem cells and injected, or the organ itself is grown on a synthetic mesh. No serious researcher in the field of regenerativ medicine is proposing "growing a clone for replacement organs", one only hears such nonsense from bad sci-fi writers and religious nuts.
Anti: Stem cell therapy will be too expensive for ordinary people anyway!
Pro: This is pure speculation. Any new procedure is expensive, including adult pluripotent stem cell work and certainly killing a person's immune system and replacing it with marrow stem cells grown in the lab. Fund the research normally and demand that the research is made available for everyone.
The best thing about stem cell research is that it is about finding _cures_: new organs, new nerves, new brain tissue. Folks cured should be able to return to their lives, get back to work, etc. This is the ultimate dream of medicine: curing people of the ravages of disease and age, rather than just keeping sick folks alive for a few more years.
The opposition arises because the embryo is seen to be an individual. That is what religious opinion on the matter boils down to, that this thing in question is an individual. And that means there is no ontological difference between the embryo and me. I'm just bigger.
The masses aren't all coming from one side of the political spectrum either. There are Democrats for Life and Libertarians for Life.
It is a little ironic that this is framed as religion vs science because it was really science that influenced opinion on the question of life. During the 19th century embryology was a new field and you had doctors that came to the conlusion that religion was wrong about life beginning at quickening (when fetal movement is first felt) and that the laws of the country were also deficient in that regard. It was the American Medical Association that went about trying to change public opinion and the laws. They actually didn't even get much support from churches at the time. But you'll notice that most of the laws overturned in Roe vs Wade came from this time. So maybe if the AMA hadn't gone around enlightening people in the 1860s then this stem cell issue wouldn't be an issue.
I've helped to archive some of the AMA's stuff on the web. The questions they posed are still very relevent and it's an interesting read. That's really where the whole issue began as I see it.
Most of the arguments against abortion in those times had to do with danger to the woman from e.g. the use of unsanitary instruments. Antibiotics wouldn't be available for the better part of a century. Now that the death rate from legal first-trimester abortion is a small fraction of the death rate from full-term pregnancy, all of these arguments (which are circumstantial, not moral) point the other way. Accordingly, the argument of the antis has changed. The AMA is mostly staying out of it, because they get the business either way and have no axe to grind (delivery pays better than abortions, but liability premiums for OB-GYN practice eats the difference).
Scientists restrict study to entire physical universe; creationist
- Because you consider embryos to be people, I should be bound by your beliefs? Does freedom of conscience extend only as far as the right to agree with you?
- An infant cannot give consent to donate its organs any more than an embryo can. However, the parents of dying/dead infants often donate their organs to save other people's children. This is where babies with biliary atresia (a congenital malformation of the bile ducts which is uniformly fatal) get their donor livers and another chance at life.
Just for your information, I have never seen a decent response to either of these questions from a member of the right-to-life persuasion. Feel free to be the first.Ponder the consequences, starting with the tenets of some of the more radical animal-rights groups. If a large group of folks decided that cows and chickens were people, would you give up hamburgers and omelettes?
Is that wrong, by your lights?
If not, what is your argument against the parents of frozen pre-embryos (16-cell clusters) donating those cells for use in stem-cell research or treatments, instead of just throwing them down the sewer if they aren't going to be used? Keep in mind that the pre-embryo is dead either way, and that throwing away the pre-embryos is not at all different from the normal implantation failures of the human reproductive scheme.
Scientists restrict study to entire physical universe; creationist
There is no cloning here. This has never been illegal, this is just a clarification.
Sen. Deborah Ortiz authored the bill that states California will explicitly allow embryonic stem cell research, and allows for both the destruction and donation of embryos.
The bill requires clinics that do in-vitro fertilization procedures to inform women they have the option to donate discarded embryos to research. It requires written consent for donating embryos for research and bans the sale of embryos.
Get a free ipod.
The issue of embriotic destruction is a religious one and should not be federally precluded.
You know, the Christians also prohibit lying and murdering. (Yes, they're hypocrites, but we're talking about their ideals here.) That doesn't make laws against murder a religious issue.
I agree with the conclusion that the government has no place prohibiting stem cell research, but if the best reason you can think of is "The Christians are against it, thus we must allow it!", then you really need to check your premises.
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Here's what the bible says about the right to life of children: happy is he who smashes the heads of little children on rocks." Psalms 137:9.
BTW, abortion was quite common in ancient israel. It was very commonly done by eating a semi-poisonous plant.
If you don't understand any of my sayings, come to me in private and I shall take you in my German mouth.
Something that a lot of people seem to either not know, or conveniently forget, is that stem cells can be retrieved from sources other than embryos. Vast amounts can be harvested from placentas, even more than can be harvested from an embryo. They can also be retrieved from umbilical cords. Scientists have even been able to find useful stem cells from adult muscle tissue.
The point is that this is not a medical issue. All of the research benefits from embryonic stem cell use can be realized through the use of stem cells that are done without the destruction of a single embryo.
This is a pro-life/pro-choice issue. The question is one of whether you believe that a developing fetus/embryo is a person, and if its destruction is destroying a person.
...we have the christians to thank for recursion.
Are we too far off from a day when Hollywood millionaires will keep a stockpile of organs on hand to replace when necessary? When months at the Betty Ford Clinic is replaced by a few whacks of a scalpel to replace a burnt-out liver?
I'm well aware that this is a rather reactionary response, and I'll stop hyperventilating now. But I still can't help feeling deeply cynical when I flip the page from the tiny amount of space newspapers provide for hard science articles to the massive amounts of space devoted to celebrity, entertainment, fashion, and beauty.
I'll be a little more impressed when I hear that you've turned down a heart transplant, bible thumper. Heart disease runs in my family, and it's morons like you who are standing in the way of perfect heart transplants. I hate to use a movie as an example, but look at John Q. The guy was fighting to get his kid on a LIST of people waiting for other people to DIE, just so they can cut out their organs and hope to hell that they are accepted in the recipient's body. What a sick joke if we can just grow them ourselves. If you don't want your stem cell grown heart, don't take it. But stay the fuck out of the way of me and my benefits of medical research. I don't begrudge you your principles and beliefs, but the minute you try to shove them on others, you can cram the father, the son, and the holy ghost back up Mary's cunt and tell her to give birth to it elsewhere.
Call me a troll if you like, but I will tell you this: If you stand in the way of human progress, you will be crushed.
God or "non-God" can't be "proven."
Correct.
There is lots of evidence for the existance of God.
I defy you to produce even one item of objective and compelling evidence demonstrating the existence of God.
We Christians (well, the ones that think) don't beling in God, "just because,"
My position is that in the absence of objective proof, any thinking person must be prepared to accept that either possibility may be the objective truth. If a person is utterly unable to accept that one of the possibilities may be true, then he is irrational.
Since my understanding anyway is that a True Christian must accept only one possibility, then a True Christian cannot be a rational person. When dealing with irrational people, all bets are off.
Let me describe the difference between life and A LIFE to you. Life is anything which respires, metabolizes, etc. If the living whatever came from human origins, it's human life in some sense. However, that definition makes no distinction between a Nobel laureate, a brain-dead gunshot victim or a 16-cell embryo. In other words, it is meaningless for the purpose of deciding the question you think is so important. So why do you continue to use it?
A human life is something human which also has a functioning brain. Once you have brain death, the human life is gone even if you have organs and tissues plugging away. This is why a 16-cell pre-embryo is not A LIFE. It has no ability to think or even feel, it has no self, and nobody should be required by anything other than their own personal desire or sense of obligation to give it one. It comes down to personal conscience. If someone would rather that their 16-cell cluster be part of a cure for someone's nasty disease instead of becoming a baby they don't want, that's their right to determine - not yours.
If you are so insistent that 16-cell pre-embryos are full human beings, you should therefore have a funeral for every one which winds up on a tampon instead of growing into a baby. I know that even you think that this is ridiculous, which means that you don't even take your own argument seriously. Hypocrite.
Scientists restrict study to entire physical universe; creationist
So if my three year old can't argue for his own humanity, then he's not a person?
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
So you might say Jesus' miracles are impossible to explain scientifically. Even then, the argument is bogus.
"(1) X performed miracles. (2) X said he was empowered to do so by God. (3) Therefore God exists." is not a valid argument. X could have been mistaken. That's a logical possibility, isn't it? Your argument needs to be fleshed out some more if it is to be logical.
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