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Obama To Reverse Bush Limits On Stem Cell Work
An anonymous reader sends this quote from the Associated Press:
"Reversing an eight-year-old limit on potentially life-saving science, President Barack Obama plans to lift restrictions Monday on taxpayer-funded research using embryonic stem cells. ... Under President George W. Bush, taxpayer money for that research was limited to a small number of stem cell lines that were created before Aug. 9, 2001, lines that in many cases had some drawbacks that limited their potential usability. But hundreds more of such lines — groups of cells that can continue to propagate in lab dishes — have been created since then, ones that scientists say are healthier, better suited to creating treatments for people rather than doing basic laboratory science. Work didn't stop. Indeed, it advanced enough that this summer, the private Geron Corp. will begin the world's first study of a treatment using human embryonic stem cells, in people who recently suffered a spinal cord injury. Nor does Obama's change fund creation of new lines. But it means that scientists who until now have had to rely on private donations to work with these newer stem cell lines can apply for government money for the research, just like they do for studies of gene therapy or other treatment approaches."
Anti-abortionists are going to have a field day with this. If stem cells can be harvested from aborted fetuses, and stem cells actually fulfill their promise as everyone expects they will, then getting an abortion suddenly becomes not so much the destruction of one life but the preservation of many.
Embryonic stem cells do not come from aborted fetuses, at least not from the traditional type of abortion. Embryonic stem cells come from left over fertilized eggs at fertility clinics that are to be thrown away. These are thawed, encouraged to begin development, then harvested for stem cells, which destroys them.
(I find it ironic that the last time stem cells came up, someone accused pro-lifers of trying to say that stem comes come from abortions)
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
Indeed, and now that a reliable method of making stem cells WITHOUT KILLING has been invented.
Yes, precisely! There are proven stem cell treatments accomplished without killing human embryos:
Given the deep moral objection a significant part of the community has to the use of embryonic stem cells, and given that it looks like there have been large advances in the use of adult and other stem cells, why lift the funding ban? I mean, all other things being equal, wouldn't it be better to not wander into a moral gray area?
As I understand it, one of the major points of the ban was to discourage the field from becoming reliant on stem cells that required further destruction of embryos. I might be wrong, but from my understanding great leaps have been doing just that - that adult and other non-destructive forms of stem cell research have been fruitful. If that's the case, I don't understand the point of lifting the ban other than for purely political purposes.
I honestly don't understand how the "destruction of embryos" for medical research is worse than the "destruction of embryos" for IVF. The only difference I can see is that IVF is a procedure that conservatives have done all the time, while medical research is done by the evil liberal scientists.
All this hand-waving over stem cells strikes me as dishonest. The people who call killing embryos for research a tragedy have no problem letting them die en masse in other circumstances. For example, why aren't they pushing for medical technology to save every last fertilized ovum? I guess life isn't as important as scoring political points.
"Reversing an eight-year-old limit on potentially life-saving science..." Currently unproven to save even one life, but proven to destroy human embryos.
To back up my post:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stem_cell#Embryonic
How can a pregnancy be aborted if there is no pregnancy at all?
Well, of course *life* begins at conception, thats not the point. We have no problem destroying all kinds of life. Ever swat a mosquito? Ever eat a salad?
Arguing about where life begins is misleading, since its not life that we respect, but that certain something that makes us "human". To some people this is sentience - once the fetus developes an active brain, it should be given the same rights as humans. For others, it is a "soul", or some other etherial, hard-to-pin-down item that makes us different from other, "lower", life forms.
Based on the assumptions that the a "soul" is what makes us special, and that a "soul" is given at conception, the logical conclusion is that abortions are wrong because it is the killing of what essentially amounts to a human being. I submit, however, that the assumptions that this conclusion is based upon are absurd. Not because they *could not* be so, but because there is no evidence (or even a compelling reason to believe) that it *is so*.
I further submit that the only logical way to determine the point at which a fertilized egg becomes worthy of the protections afforded to humans is by noting when it developes those characteristics of humans that we believe sets us appart. We cannot observe a soul, nor can we demonstrate its existance. We can, though, determine when the brain develops, determine when the fetus becomes sentient in some small way.
Not even a dozen posts in we already have shitheads bemoaning that 'babies die' when these cells are harvested.
1. According to the Department of Bioethics, anywhere between sixty to eighty percent of fertilized eggs fail to attach to the uterus naturally.
2. Though a precursor to a fully formed human being, these little balls of cells have neither brains nor senses. They have no qualia, no conscious phenomena. They are at most minuscule fragments of tissue - kind of like the smears most of you leave on the sheets at night.
3. If the cells that precede the formation of a human being that will never grow to become even a fetus, much less a fully formed infant, can be used to save lives that exist today, why not? A human that will never be is effectively dead.
4. All of these things can be taken into consideration without devaluing conscious human life, because conscious human life this is not.
We're not giving permission to Anton LaVey to tear the fetuses of misbegotten children from the rancid wombs of unwed women of color while Marilyn Manson and 50 Cent plays over the back alley abortion clinic's P.A. system, you stupid fucking hicks. If you believe that human life begins 'when the sperm hits the germ' then every mother that has attempted to get pregnant and failed repeatedly could very probably be guilty of negligent homicide because of point number one.
And besides, we can get plenty of cells from elsewhere so the debate is now largely moot save for those few situations where adult cells may not suffice.
Life does not begin at conception, the sperm and egg cells that exists before conception are very much alive themself already. Albeit lacking the ability to divide into anything useful without first combining their genetic materials and finding a generous donor of nutrients and growing space.
As for the eggs, the fertility treatment doesn't work by picking out one egg, fertilizing it, putting it into a female and then seeing if it falls out again or gets stuck. It's more like picking a basket of eggs, fertilizing them all, screening them for defects, picking out the best one(s) and putting them back into the mother. This leaves us with a basket of motherless embryos(or zygotes in the early stages, but still motherless)(which in reality looks something like a basket full of seemingly empty petri dishes, not a pile of screaming dying babies as some would prefer us to belive). Calling them aborted is retarded simply because they aren't.
Oh, and they're only called fetuses after 8 weeks. they're embryos until then. And as they'll be put to the torch either way, why not try to derive something useful from them? If a few human cells lacking a nervous system is of so great importance then the prospect of saving several billions of human cells with a nervous system by providing reconstruction of failed organs and systems should be a national top priority.
But it means that scientists who until now have had to rely on private donations to work with these newer stem cell lines can apply for government money for the research,
Because the State of California is giving out private donations?
I was kind of pissed at Bush for blocking federal funding on new lines until I really thought about it for awhile. There's nothing that precludes researchers from doing research on new lines.
If people wanted this so bad, what prevented them from pulling out their checkbooks? Hello, there, Silicon Valley. There's lots of rich people there. How about a donation? You, too, Hollywood, if this is such a big issue.
As to why Obama's doing it, well, two reasons. First, it satisfies a niche constituency, who like to see abortion-related topics pressed to the forefront at every opportunity. Second, his tax plan does probably kill off the possibility of private funding.
(I'm pro-choice, BTW. But to look past Obama's shallow political motives, and to ignore the reality of the situation while Bush was president is very foolish.)
Life begins much earlier than conception. You cannot take a dead egg and a dead sperm and make anything living out of it. Stop co-mingling the idea of life with the idea of sexual reproduction, and you'll realize that there's a lot of life out there, and only some of it is sexual. Even in sexual organisms, living sperm and eggs are not where life begins; they are literally byproducts of the life they are made from.
Life is a continuum. Of course, now that I've stated the only consistent obvious rationalization, you'll definitely agree.
The millennia of pre-scientific religious training is the barrier that's prompting people to pipe up and say, "Well when I said Life I didn't mean it that way. I meant we as-in super-special HUMAN animal life." Which again doesn't make sense from the human angle, because you can't take a dead human sperm and a dead human egg and make a living anything either.
So what it boils down to is the "super-special" part. We become super-special at inception, and to prove it to ourselves, we'll state that we have an exclusive something that no other animal in the universe has. So we don't get called out on it, let's make it undetectable. Call it a soul, if you will.
Now all the arguments boil down to, "The soul is first present at inception." Which is actually a decent argument, even if it can never be proven or dis-proven. But somehow it feels like a hollow argument, like you're not really arguing for your betterment. It's almost like you're arguing for the preservation of the Church, and you really couldn't give a damn if it means that Alzheimer's disease is cured as long as nobody shatters the super-special soul idea the Church has created which makes you better than everything else that's alive, with the exception of Jesus, who despite being alive hasn't been seen for 2000 years.
The arguments concerning "independent self sustaining" to equate to life don't make sense; infants are far from independent or self-sustainable for years. The arguments for possibly self-sustainable outside the womb equates to life don't make sense either. Possibly doesn't indicate the percentage of chance, so it could range from 100% to 0%. Assuming you dictate that it has to be more than 0%, I can pick a percentage so small that it's practially zero.
But the "possibly could be self-sustaining" is a tilted argument in other ways too. A severely premature child in a hospital is in no way self-sustaining. It's a wonder that we have such a good success rate at keeping them alive. And sooner or later the technology will be developed to have a in-vitrio child. Then the outside-the-womb self-sustaining argument won't even make sense, as the technique will remove the womb from the picture.
Perhaps we'll never develop out-of-the-womb pregnancies. But if we do not, I'll wager that it has more to do with researchers leaving certain aspects of our development untouched due to respect or fear of nearly two millennia of reasoning not based on observation, but based on patting ourselves on the back due to our super-special-nees. We have souls, hooray for us!
So since infants are unable to process logic and reason, use their opposite thumbs, walk errect, communicate with a complex speech system then they aren't worthy of the protection afforeded to humans? All of these are characteristics of humans that set us apart from the rest of the beasts, but dont actually develop until several years after birth.
At the moment of birth, there is very little physiological change to the baby. What little there is is strictly related to the respiratory/circulatory system and the umbillical cord. It is a very poor landmark to use when determining "viability" or "humanity". A baby in the womb about to pop out is no more nor less human than one born 5 minutes ago.
I wish you would apply your moral panic to causes that could actually help people.
This. I don't get the outrage of stem cells for this reason. I can understand how religious people can feel harvesting embryos or whatever is wrong. But if it's wrong, it's a wrong done with at least good intentions, that harms no one (abortions are not going to stop, stem cell research or not). There's so much going on thats wrong in this world, even in this country. Ethnic cleansing, human rights abuses, etc. In our country alone, the government steals from the poor and gives to the rich, imprisons millions for drugs and puts them in a prison system that is completely overrun with racism, violence, drugs, sexual abuse, and sexually transmitted diseases. For a religon based on teachings of tolerance, love for your enemy, forgiveness, and redemption, you would think the state of our for-profit-prisons would have the "religious right" outraged! Somehow I think Christ would be more concerned about helping those on the very bottom of our society, then condemning Doctors bending their ethics to potentially help make the lame walk again (in fact I hear he was a big fan of healing cripples).
It seems to me you could easily spend your entire life fighting whats wrong in this world, and never even get around to stem cells. It's a small, pathetic issue to crusade against. But I suppose because it is small, it is easy to divert your attention to, easy to cope with. After all, the big issues would require you to look with open eyes, and maybe admit you were wrong. That would take humility, and I'm pretty sure Jesus was strongly against that, if the leaders of the religious right are any example.