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Stem Cells Mend Spinal Injuries
Darkman, Walkin Dude writes "New research shows that rats that had their spinal columns severed were able to regain use of their hind legs through the use of stem cells from embryonic rats." From the Wired article: "Spinal cord injuries can be caused by accidents or infections and affect 250,000 people a year in the United States alone, costing $4 billion annually, according to the National Institute of Neurological Disorders. Whittemore's team took specific cells from rat embryos called glial restricted precursor cells -- a kind of stem cell or master cell that gives rise to nerve cells."
Oh, that's right... the frozen embryos have souls or some such shit. Yes, this is a hateful post because I simply can't fathom why this scientific area can't be advanced without controversy in the US. I really, really don't get it. I'd love for somebody to explain it to me. Please!
I just wasted your mod points! HA!
...because we have snivling bio-ethics people who cry about 'playing god' when these same morons get the sniffles, they want the most powerful drugs in existance to not only kill their bug - but to blow it's ass to mars...
Like you said, the frozen embryos and the stem cells taken from them aren't ours to screw around with like this. They do (and should) belong to the organism they were taken from.
Wonderful, said organism is frozen and 99% likely never to see any functional life.
When it comes to human stem cells, that organism is another human life. It's a simple path from "We want the paraplegic to walk again" to "we will kill humans to allow others to walk again".
Do tell, Anonymous Coward, why is taking stem cells from a donated and otherwise perpetually frozen embryo equal to killing a human?
*shrug*. and people wonder why this country is going downhill
Obviously, because of MTV.
I just wasted your mod points! HA!
Well, let's see, there IS the question of when life begins. You can't have seen any discussion of embryonic stem cell research without encountered that aspect.
There's also a very valid concern about preventing trafficking in human tissue. Just as there are lots and lots of controls on organ harvesting and donations, there needs to be a way to prevent pregnancies simply for the sake of harvesting embryos to gain such tissue.
There are also a lot of concerns about ensuring this is actually a path with true possibility of results rather than a ghoulish battleground over the value of life and a macabe sideshow. Think of how the Nazi and Imperial Japanese performed experiments on living people. Where is the line drawn? It's a very serious issue.
Monstrously irresponsible snake-oil statements like that made by John Whatshisname (yeah, he was even "my" senator, shows how much he did for NC) that if John Kerry was elected President quadraplegics woudl stand up out of their wheelchairs and walk again are...shall we say...far less than responsible.
On the other hand, if the comments Senator Frist made are true that it is now evident that stem cells are not capable of endless regeneration and there are far fewer than the original 78 strains of stem cells available for federally funded research, perhaps allowing collection of stem cells from those which are left over from invitreo is a good idea.
Your post shows you don't really know much about this.
There is no restriction on private investment into stem cell research.
There are sources of human stem cells other than killing human embryos. Given the current belief that human embyonic stem cells cannot replicate indefinately, they are actually a poor source of the genetic material.
(Sidebar: there are very, very, very few human cells which can replicate endlessly. I don't remember the anem of the woman from whom one strain was harvested and is used for bio research. Virtually all cells have a limit to the number of tiems they can split.)
Prior to President Bush's plan of 4 years ago, there was no Federal funding for this research at all. A lot of what you would be seeing in the common media is not scientific, it's political.
What we need is a bulldozer to run over the children of every republican congressmen (at the state and federal levels,) not enough to kill them.. just force them into a fucking wheelchair, permanently. Then we'll see some opinions change.. until then, these scum sucking bastards will keep on promising their hardcore religious base that they'll protect america from the insidious & godless liberal infiltrators, fuck science, fuck progress, and fuck you america -> I'm getting elected again!
What kind of fucking maniac are you? Your publically advocating the maiming of innocent children for what you preceve as the sins of the parents. You should have your spine severed somewhere between your brain and your body....no wait, it's already happened for you to make such a hateful comment. I'm all for progress, better life through science, and all that bull shit. But give it a rest. You wanna maim the people that are voting and deciding this bull shit on the government level, fine, I'm all for that. It's people like you that give the freaks in the religious faction all the ammo they need to push forward with this shit. Mod this down if you like, But the parent post needs to be modded down too.
"Does your computer have IP on it?"
It is because we haven't had time to adequately address the moral concerns such activity raises.
It was largely agreed at the end of the second world war that the human experimentation that went on in NAZI germany was wrong. This is despite the numerous real medical advancements that were made as a result of such experimentation. Most reasonable individuals agreed that the societal cost performing compulsory experiments on essentially random members of society was greater than the benefit of the resulting medical knowledge.
It has since been agreed that, to some extent, animal experiment is okay as long as certain moral guidelines are followed. This is because cruelty toward animals has a dehumanizing effect on the human participant (as evidenced by the fact that most serial killers got their start with animals).
This puts us in a tricky situation when it comes to embryos and cloning. On the one hand, it is well established that an embryo is not the same as a person, on the other hand, an embryo has the potential the become a living, breathing member of society. So where do you draw the line? If experimentation on embryos is not human experimentation, is is certainly the cousin of human experimentation.
I'm not saying that the cost is not worth the benefit, I am only saying that there is a cost, and that we need to decide how far down the path toward human experimentation we can go before the costs outweigh the benefits.
Because I have karma to burn...
The exact quote from John Edwards is, "If we do the work that we can do in this country, the work that we will do when John Kerry is president, people like Christopher Reeve are going to get up out of that wheelchair and walk again."
I don't find anything particularly monstrously irresponsible about this quote. He doesn't imply that people will get up out of their wheelchairs a week or two after Kerry would have been elected. I think most people, like me, are smart enough to realize that curing spinal cord injury is a while coming.
However, personally, I'm convinced that if we put our collective ingenuity in medical research towards finding a cure for spinal cord injuries, we will get real and tangible results, as this article demonstrates. It's not a cure, but it sure is progress.
The election of John Kerry would not have necessarily accomplished this goal during his presidency, and I don't think that Edwards's quote was implying that it would. After all, John F. Kennedy said in 1961, "I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth." Even if he had not been assassinated in 1963 and re-elected in 1964, his goal still wouldn't have happened while he was in office.
It is certain that the election of George W. Bush has hindered the goal of finding a cure to spinal cord injury. He has shut down a major source of funding in an area of research that, as we can see from this article, is directly relevant to finding a cure.
The really frustrating thing is the reason given for shutting down this funding—some misguided notion that an embryo is somehow morally equivalent to a human being. I find it interesting that most of these fundamentalists have no problem at all with killing highly complex organisms such as rats, monkeys, rabbits, and so on in the name of scientific research, but a clump of nondescript cells with no capacity for thought, feeling, or any sensation at all; a clump of nondescript cells with no past, present, or future; a clump of nondescript cells very similar to the kind that we wash off in the shower every day without even thinking; is somehow sacred.
What if these same fundamentalists had insisted that researching advanced rocket propulsion techniques in the '60's was too similar to building a Tower of Babel, attempting to reach to heaven? Would John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson have cowered to this weird religious-based belief and let the Russians unilaterally own space today?
I hope not, just as I hope that in the next election, we manage to get some leadership who is willing to stand up for science that can make our lives better instead of trying to push America further and further into a new dark age of technology because of religious fundamentalism.
Hmmm, yes a "clump of cells" as long as it wasn't the "clump of cells" that turned out to be you.
If it was the clump of cells that would have turned out to be me, I promise you I wouldn't have minded at the time, and after that I wouldn't be in a position to be minding anything.
Sure, no problem. A lot of people like to think that an embryo is morally a person, but in our practical day-to-day lives, no one really treats it as such. Ponder this:
These are just a few ways off the top of my head in which even conservatives do not treat an embryo or fetus as the moral equivalent of a human being. I'm sure if I put some more thought into it, I could come up with plenty more.
No, we're not. That's my point.
But the clump of cells wasn't me, therefore it's irrelevant. I keep seeing people confuse something's potential with it's reality. Just because something has the potential to be something else doesn't give it the status or rights of that thing it may someday become. As someone else pointed out, if my mom had had an abortion, it wouldn't make a lick of difference to me because I simply would have never existed. This is far, far different from my present life being ended by someone sneaking in and killing me in the middle of the night, because at this point, my existence isn't potential, it's reality.
Using your logic, one could just as easily say that if Osama bin Laden's mother had had an abortion, the world would arguably be a much happier and safer place, and because of this, women should have more abortions. It's a non sequitur and I reject such arguments. Let's make important decisions like this based on what what the reality of the situation is, not what it may or may not be someday or what it could or could not have been if something had been different.
Or framed in a different way, it's very possible in the near future that we'll be able to clone human beings from the intact DNA contained in any of the millions of cells in our bodies. At that point, should we start saving every sloughed off cell because the potential exists for it to be a person? Additionally, we probably have the technology now to freeze our extra cells to save them for the purpose of becoming new human beings when such technology does exist. Should we never let any of them go to waste now? Of course not, everyone knows that's silly. The same holds true for the clump of cells that is an embryo. Just because it has the potential to be a human being someday doesn't give it any special or sacred status today.
I find it interesting that most of these fundamentalists have no problem at all with killing highly complex organisms such as rats, monkeys, rabbits, and so on...
Heck, forget the monkeys--what about their bland willingness (or even outright blood lust) for killing non-christians? "Thou shalt not kill" isn't all that hard of a concept.
It doesn't say "thou shalt not kill people who look like you".
It doesn't say "Thou shalt not kill except for oil."
It doesn't even say "Thou shalt not kill unless they started it, in which case it's fine to open a little Whoop-ass on their sorry Is-le-amic butts."*
I wouldn't mind the fundementalists (of any flavour) nearly as much if they actually pratciced what they preached instead of running around like a bunch of anti-social nitwits, blowing up buses and abortion clinics and killing people--or voting to have somebody else's kids go kill them--in the name of their god.
--MarkusQ
* What it does say about "they started it" is "turn the other cheek."