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Court Rules Against Stem Cell Policy
An anonymous reader sends this quote from Reuters:
"A US district court issued a preliminary injunction Monday stopping federal funding of human embryonic stem cell research, in a slap to the Obama administration's new guidelines on the sensitive issue. The court ruled in favor of a suit filed in June by researchers who said human embryonic stem cell research involves the destruction of human embryos. Judge Royce Lamberth granted the injunction after finding that the lawsuit would likely succeed because the guidelines violated law banning the use of federal funds to destroy human embryos. '(Embryonic stem cell) research is clearly research in which an embryo is destroyed,' Lamberth wrote in a 15-page ruling."
But my mother is vegged out in a home with Alzheimer's. I may look forward to the same.
How much easier it is to be critical than to be correct.
-Benjamin Disraeli
Not to worry, the reset of the world can still do embryonic research.
I suggest all those Republican women who feel that the use of embryonic stem cells for medical research is a greater outrage then their eventual destruction each volunteer their uterus to bring them to term and raise as their own. Or shut the f*ck up and let science advance.
Doctors James Sherely of Watertown, Massachusetts, and Theresa Diesher of Seattle, identified by Lamberth as adult stem cell researchers, sued in August 2009, arguing that NIH guidelines breach the Dickey-Wicker strictures. They also argued that they were being irreparably harmed by having to compete for NIH funding with researchers using embryonic cells.
Wait, what? They're being done harm by competing with this research? So... embryonic cells are that much superior? (Sounds like we should make sure this is as legal as can be pronto!) But they can't evidently use them themselves?
Man, if I could sue every time I found someone else who had an edge on me in research, I'd be the only person active in my field right now. Sign me up!
Wouldnt the use of aborted fetuses carry just as much baggage (if not more) than embryos? How does that allay any objections?
Further, if stem cell treatments take off in a big way, will miscarriages really be enough, or will be be back in this debate?
There is a good reason to avoid embryonic stem cell altogether. The biggest reason is because we have no good ways to control its potential to form teratoma, which is basically cancerous mass of tissues of all types. That's what's happening at those rogue Russian stem cell clinics. Although it is true that ESCs have the biggest potential to regenerate, it's also most potent cancer forming cells. Some theorize that cancer is actually rogue stem cells. Another practical reason why ESCs could be avoided is because adult stem cells have been shown to be able to transform to embryonic counterparts. This is a complex topic of its own. If you are interested look up IPS = induced pluripotent stem cell.
I apologize for my laymans terms and potentially making it seem more easy than it is, but I use that description frequently because it does, in laymans terms, and somewhat inaccurately, but close enough for general understanding purposes, describe it. It doesn't have anything to do with any gross misunderstanding on my part as you claim. Though your entire post seems to be a thinly veiled attack on hESCs in general. My apologies if I misread you.
IPS's as I understand it are inferior forms of stem cells for a number of reasons, which I won't mention here as there are already several long posts on why with citations in this stories comments.
Adult stem cells don't have anywhere near the potential of embryonic stem cells and the current advantage for some forms of treatment exists in the fact that they are already tailored to the patients DNA/Required Tissue area. As you do mention accurate implantation of embryonic stem cells is one of the major areas that needs a big breakthrough in order for them to reach their full potential, but as such, once a method is obtained to do so with good consistency the cancer problem will dissipate rapidly and the benefits will remain. More accurate implantation = less rogue embryonic stem cells that could end up in someones treatment.
The whole tech is very new and thus there are problems. Ignoring any area of research, especially one that shows the huge promise of hESCs would be negligent beyond imagining.
(I know I left I lot out, but I don't think I'm distorting the meaning). As far as I can tell, liver cells in a petri dish would count as human embryos under that definition.
Then if President Obama wants the funding, he needs to convince Congress (which his party controls) to tighten the wording of the law, or repeal it altogether.
The judge pretty much had to block this. The President can't simply wave his hand and declare a law passed by Congress (and sighed by the previous President) to be null and void. There's still that whole separation of powers thing to consider. If the wording of the Dickey Amendment is too vague, then it's the responsibility of Congress to fix it.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
(2) research in which a human embryo or embryos are destroyed, discarded, or knowingly subjected to risk of injury or death
So, we aren't distinguishing between research destroying embryos, and research that uses embryos that necessarily are doomed to destruction if they aren't allowed to replicate in stem cell research.
Glad I got that straight.
There is just no way to square it with the statute.
I disagree. Exercise the ability to distinguish, and it is clear how this is not research in which embryos are destroyed, but research in which they are allowed to live when they would otherwise be destroyed. Not live and develop into humans, but that really isn't possible anyway.
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Adult stem cells are sub-par replacements for embryonic stem cells.
And yet, despite your claim, almost all of the big advances from stem cell research has come from non-embryonic lines of cells.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
I don't think that people think doctors are ripping babies from wombs. It has to do with drawing the line as to what you call a human. Is a baby a human? Is a 6 or 3 month old fetus a human? Is a single fertilized egg a human? There's no easy answer because people can't even agree on how to define a human when it's full grown. Most people have their own opinion based on their indiviudal logic or faith or whatever, and no one can really make a definitive answer one way or another based on any arguement whether it's logical, scientific, or faith based.
My question is: why all the fuss over embryonic stem cells? I'm not a bio-chem guy but I know enough to understand the arguements, and the one thing I don't get is that there are better stem cells out there than embryonic. Embryonic stem cells people think have a lot of promise, but they're blank slates and if you were to regrow some sort of damaged tissue, how would you control the growth so it doesn't become some cancerous tumour, especially when it's harvested from an outside source? There's plenty of research that shows that adult stem cells are much more likely to have better results as cures, and are harvested directly from your own body so it's not like you're infusing your body with teh cells of some other person that may not be compatible. And adult stem cells don't carry all of the abortion political baggage. So why all the fuss over embryonic stem cells when there's a politically more palatable solution already found with potentially more promise?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adult_stem_cell
They can't be obtained from abortions or miscarriages, which occur later, but rather are typically surplus IVF embryos.
Correct, embryos harvested for ESC are 5 days post fertilization. A pregnancy test would not show that a woman is carrying a blastocyst at this point, so it is impossible that abortions will be used to supply ESC: you don't get an abortion 5 days after conception because you don't know you're pregnant.
By the time you know you're pregnant, that embryo's stem cells have continued with development past the point of pluripotency, the ability to make any type of cell.
They sidestep a lot of ethical objections by not having any sort of nervous system, or indeed any tissue differentiation apart from a separate type of cell on the outside of the sphere that is destined to form a placenta.
Unfortunately, the people who object to ESC are less concerned with cell biology or anything tangible or proveable and more concerned about souls. If it has a soul, it's murder, they say.
My question to such people is how do you know the soul is started at conception? The scripture they quote as proof is ambiguous at best (and in my opinion doesn't say much of anything relevant to the matter). I think scripture is a terrible basis for policy decisions as a rule. More importantly, it's my understanding that up until 12 days post fertilization, the embryo can split to form twins. Are these people suggesting that a twin is only half a person? Are they some type of special exception? Does twinning cause these people to question their interpretations? Of course not.
Biology and religion have never squared well with each other, and it's pure insanity to combine those two with laws.
Since you commented anonymously I don't know if you will see this but I will reply anyhow.
Which is why it is very important to squash the perpetuated lies about abortions being used for embryonic stem cell research. Rather than base a moral decision on visions of dead babies it is better to learn the facts. And the fact is that there is a hugely significant difference between a fertilized egg and a 3 month old fetus, and the difference becomes even more significant when we consider that these are not fertilized eggs inside a womb that have some calculable probability of gestating and growing into a human baby. We are talking about human cells that will absolutely never gestate into a human for the same reason that an unused egg lost through menstruation or sperm ejaculated during a wet dream or even a naturally fertilized egg that fails to embed to the uterus wall will absolutely positively never become human babies even though they are human cells and under the appropriate conditions would actually have a reasonable probability of becoming a human.
It is my hope that a discovery is made that will make this question moot, however, as it stands today there are significant advantages in the use of embryonic stem cells. I have no intention of going through all the article research again but a few months back I had this same discussion with another individual and based on what I have read the adult stem cells actually present a greater risk of cancer than embryonic stem cells. In fact, the wiki article you linked to provides references to research suggesting adult stem cells are the source of cancer.
But I will provide one additional link before I end my commenting, the utilization of stem cells, adult or embryonic, as a source for cures to diseases will require a plentiful supply of cells. This is exactly where adult stem cells fail as noted at the National Institutes of Health.
"Embryonic stem cells can be grown relatively easily in culture. Adult stem cells are rare in mature tissues, so isolating these cells from an adult tissue is challenging, and methods to expand their numbers in cell culture have not yet been worked out. This is an important distinction, as large numbers of cells are needed for stem cell replacement therapies."
They sidestep a lot of ethical objections by not having any sort of nervous system, or indeed any tissue differentiation apart from a separate type of cell on the outside of the sphere that is destined to form a placenta.
Unfortunately, the people who object to ESC are less concerned with cell biology or anything tangible or proveable and more concerned about souls.
I have to admit, I've never heard this as a stated objection to ESC. This is the first time I've heard either of these objections - either the nervous system OR the souls. Makes me wonder if it's a strawman.
The reality is that the embryo is biologically a distinct human being. The same objection would be raised if we had to end a 20-year-old's life to save my mother, or a 10-year-old's life, or a 1-year-old's life, or a -8.3-month-old's life. You don't sacrifice one person's life for another (though they may choose to sacrifice their own life, but I don't think anyone is going to argue that an embryo can choose that sacrifice). And that's the basic objection.
The secondary objection I've heard is that adult stem cells have managed to solve a great number of problems already, and, as far as I can tell, we haven't reached a limit (*) on those yet, so why go down an ethically controversial road when an ethically non-controversial road has not yet been fully explored (**)?
(*) I use "limit" here more as a statistical limit (80-20 rule: 80% of the value, 20% of the work) rather than a mathematical one. Given this is /., I better make that explicit.
(**) Here I use the term "fully" in the same sense as the above "limit". Great breakthroughs are being made regularly still. The pace has not slowed down. And, unlike AI or a lot of other technologies discussed on /., many of these are less than 5 years away from practical use.
The ancient question arises: when a man is a man? Is a kid less human than an adult? Is a fetus less human than a kid? Is an embryo less human than a fetus? Is a morula less human than an embryo? And we can get to the very genesis of the conception: the fusion of the gametes. There is a very clear before and after the conception, and I strongly believe that a fertilized egg should be considered a human being because of its potentiality: feed it and let it grow and it will become a man.
You know, That might be insightful if it was factually correct.
http://www.ncsl.org/IssuesResearch/Health/FetalHomicideLaws/tabid/14386/Default.aspx
Even CA calls it Homicide if malicious forethought. It would be an exercise for the reader to see if the laws are ever enforced.
My question to such people is how do you know the soul is started at conception?
The same question could be posed as how do you know it doesn't? It's as poor an argument to base opposition to a religious belief on a question that science is completely unable to answer in the first place.
The real question that should be posed in this is, what is the possible harm done under either assumption, and which is worse? Under the assumption that life starts at conception, then the harm done is tantamount to murder, however someone else's life might be saved by doing so. Under the assumption that these are just genetic material and don't have any moral implications to their use, then obviously the medical breakthroughs would be preferable. The point is to have the discussion without falling into religious fervor or scientific elitism (which it is since science is necessarily mute on the question of when life begins)
My personal opinion is that breakthroughs from adult stem cells have easily eclipsed the promise of embryonic stem cells Pluripotent Adult Stem Cells. We could simply avoid any moral hazards by continuing research on those since there are no objections from any side on their use.
Government is not reason; it is not eloquent; it is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master.
I think what the other guy was referring to with IVF is this:
When couples want to get pregnant through in vitro fertilzation, the doctor doesn't just join one sperm, and one egg, and hope it works. The process is too expensive and unreliable for it to (reasonably) work that way. So, they harvest a large number of eggs at once, and fertilize as many as possible, freezing the ones they don't need. Once the woman has been successfully impregnated, they either throw the fertilized eggs away, or send them to a stem cell research lab.
IVF should bring with it all the ethical and moral concerns that come from first-trimester abortion (more so, when you consider how many fertilized eggs are destroyed). But, in the end, a baby pops out of a vagina, so that changes it from "murder" to "miracle from god".
Souls do not exist. There is no evidence for them. What we call a "soul" is just the maintained state of an electro-chemical chain reaction we harbour in our bodies. It's like the flame on a candle - when the candle runs out, the flame doesn't go into another existence, or have an existential breakdown seconds before dying, it just ceases to be. Keep souls out of science, for fuck's sake. Or I guess we should ask Bigfoot what he thinks about manned space exploration and do what he thinks is right?
You do realize that your third sentence directly contradicts the first two, right?
Perhaps you meant that souls as supernatural entities that survive the death of body don't exist, which may or may not be true but is not provable either way. However, what should be pretty obvious is that people who think that they do are not going to be impressed or convinced by your assertion that they don't, especially when you deliver it in such an inaccurate form.
We are talking about ethics here. Metaphysical questions - such as do souls exist - are unavoidable in such a context, since what is right and wrong often depend on the underlaying assumptions about the nature of reality.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
You don't think people could have gotten together and said "I don't wanna die, you don't wanna die; let's not kill each other" without an invisible parental figure shaking a finger from the sky?
The stories and info posted here are artistic works of fiction and falsehood.
Only fools would take it as fact.
Even if your conclusion is right, your arguments are weak. Bacteria aren't people. Sperm can't grow into a human. If the blastocyst is 'alive', then it's a human being, at one stage of development. Whether that demands societal or governmental protection is a separate matter. Defining 'life' is tricky.
Since 'funding scientific research' isn't an enumerated power of Congress, there's an easier solution than all of this debate-without-resolution - just stop.
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