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."

Comments

I appreciate the moral implications for some

[agiduda]

But my mother is vegged out in a home with Alzheimer's. I may look forward to the same.

Re:I appreciate the moral implications for some

[JimWise]

And why does that override moral concerns? Since you may face the same, why now allow doctors to stick your mother with probes, take core samples of her brain while still alive, test for levels of chemicals, amino acids, level of fat vs protein etc, which would be MUCH more accurate while still alive vs hours/days after death. Surely this would help gain insight and move forward scientific studies on how to detect Alzheimer's in a much earlier stage and more precise treatment for future sufferers. Why not re-open Nazi style medical tests on twins and fetuses, and why not lift all restrictions on live animal testing? How about using those on death row for medical research so they can at least be productive in death or force them to be organ donors? They will be dead anyways, those organs would just go to waste otherwise.

Alzheimer's has occurred on both sides of my family (grandfather on the one side, great-grandfather on the other), my mom's cousin suffered from ALS for over 10 years and even wrote a book by using nothing but moving his eyebrows, and I have already suffered a viral infection that will remain with me the rest of my life. Every time it comes out of remission (I'm currently fighting my fourth bout) it causes the lining of my brain to swell, causing a good chunk of my synapses to get destroyed, and taking years for my brain to recover to about 80-90% of where it had been before. Maybe stem cell research would find a way to fully recover from each bout and keep me from having to drop out of school/work for a handful of years each time, and having to settle for a less effective brain after each occurrence. I still don't see that as a reason to try to lessen the moral implications involved in order to try to tilt the balance in a way that could possibly improve my life of the lives of my loved ones.

I don't mean to say that the morals in stem cell research are clear cut, they definitely are not. I see NO reason though to purposely try to tilt the balance one way or another and fudge the morals and facts due to personal fears of potential illnesses, illnesses of friends and relatives, etc.

Re:I appreciate the moral implications for some

[KiloByte]

And why does that override moral concerns?

Because we suffer from some bozo's religion. If for you following it is more important that avoiding getting crippled and dying to a disease that makes the last 15 years of your life a hell for your family, it shouldn't stop me from having a portion of my tax money used in an attempt to keep me from that fate. And yeah, I had Alzheimer's on both sides of my family too.

Re:I appreciate the moral implications for some

[dreamchaser]

Treating human life as something that should be nurtured and not harvested is not something that is exclusive to religion. There are moral implications way beyond any silly mumbo jumbo myths.

For example, I am against abortion as birth control (note the difference; sometimes they are medically necessary and then there are cases of rape, etc.) but that has zero to do with any mythical dude in a beard sitting up in the clouds. It's because I think life is precious and if someone without any special circumstances winds up pregnant then that fetus should be allowed the chance to grow to term.

I'm not necessarily against embryonic stem cell research, but to dismiss the moral arguments as only those of people who cite their religion as the reason is misguided. My main concern with it is that we avoid any slippery slopes that lead to the production of embryos specifically for research. Then we are talking about the farming and harvesting of humans for our own gain.

Re:I appreciate the moral implications for some

[PopeRatzo]

Why not re-open Nazi style medical tests on twins and fetuses

Clearly your "moral concerns" don't preclude you from making inappropriate Nazi comparisons.

None of the research that was funded by the federal gov't since 2008 had anything to do with "creating life in order to destroy it.

Why are the "moral" ones always the quickest to bear false witness?

Re:I appreciate the moral implications for some

[severoon]

I am against abortion as birth control (note the difference; sometimes they are medically necessary and then there are cases of rape, etc.) but that has zero to do with any mythical dude in a beard sitting up in the clouds.

And someone else might be against the destruction of any form of human life, including human tissue comprising a mole or a tumor.

So what? Why should anyone regard that person's opinion as more or less than relevant than yours or mine?

Hospitals have ethics boards of experts tasked with making these kinds of medical decisions. Abortion is a personal medical procedure, not a political issue, not unlike embryonic stem cell research.

Consider my hypothetical person that is against destruction of any form of human life. Clearly, that is not reasonable. So, based on the state of latest medical knowledge, which forms of human life are ok to destroy and which are not? I think it has to be based on some best (conservative) guess of when sentience is present. (If you think a good argument can be made around the idea of mere "potential for life," please rethink it. Before fertilization an egg & sperm have "potential for life," and conversely, a fetus removed from the womb does not have "potential for life" until fairly late in development—so late, in fact, that it may have already developed sentience, whatever that means. To be completely consistent, you would have to accept that every egg that is allowed to go unfertilized is equivalent to murder.)

In any case, there is no one I've yet encountered that has made an argument consistent with their own views that would also prohibit embryonic stem cell research.

Re:I appreciate the moral implications for some

[ScrewMaster]

It's because I think life is precious and if someone without any special circumstances winds up pregnant then that fetus should be allowed the chance to grow to term.

The problem with that line of reasoning is that, when you get right down to it, life isn't all that precious. For most of the world, it's dirt cheap in fact. Let's drop the pretense that we care about a clump of tissue that has no possibility of ever being born, or that we really give a flying fuck about the unborn foetus of someone we've never met and couldn't care less about. You may think those are very important to you, but I guarantee that neither of those is as important to you as you yourself, or someone who is close to you. They shouldn't be, if you have your priorities straight.

The reason that it's important to consider life at all stages is far more pragmatic, and you alluded to that. If we, as a society, begin to accept that life is cheap, that life isn't worth as much as we've convinced ourselves that it is, well, it may not be an embryo or a foetus. It may very well be us, and I prefer to err on the side of caution. So, a respect for human life is important, even if only from a purely selfish perspective.

Now, having said that, I will say that your example of requiring pregnancies to continue to term regardless of whether the parents want the child is too simplistic as well. It's easy to say, "life is precious, preserve it at all costs" but one should also take into account what the child's life is going to be like, whether in fact a given society can even afford it. These are legitimately complex issues, involving a large measure of cost-benefit analysis, as cold-blooded as that can be sometimes. If you truly wish to do the most good for the most people, you have to do what is right, not just what feels right. That's very difficult to achieve for many people, because two are often diametrically opposed. As the Bishop said, "Man is a rationalizing animal, and requires training to become a rational one." Most of us never truly learn to think, because that might require painful re-evaluation of our most cherished attitudes.

If we decide that stem-cell research is too morally repugnant to be allowed, well, we have to accept a couple of things. One: other countries point-blank will not see it the same way, and two: even if they did, there will be a cost in human life if we do not realize any potential treatments. That's why you have to be able to make reasonably dispassionate judgments based upon some actual facts, or at least logical extrapolation based on fact, rather than simply offering an unthinking Yes or No. Furthermore, you have to be prepared to change your thinking if the facts warrant it.

And in the U.S. at least, I can say with some certainty that we're really not very good at that. Thinking with our heads, I mean ... we're damn good at knee-jerk reactions.

Re:I appreciate the moral implications for some

[insufflate10mg]

If you support abortions that are medically necessary then you place a higher value on the mother than the fetus. Therefore, you should have no issue with abortion in all cases. Unless of course you are not being rational.

You're right, he does place higher value on the mother than the fetus; however, second to the mother, the fetus takes highest value. Therefore, if the mother (top priority) is not at risk, the fetus (next highest priority) should be protected and given the right to live. His argument is perfectly rational, you are wrong.

Re:I appreciate the moral implications for some

[PopeRatzo]

None of the Nazi experiments involved creating life in order to destroy it either.

You're really doubling down on the Nazi stuff, hey?

Frozen embryo = victim of the Holocaust?

it is FAR too simplistic to just state that the ONLY statements against it are based on religious morality

Not religious morality, religious fanaticism. Morality is hard. Fanaticism is easy because your choices are already made for you. I only wish that the "pro-life" crowd was motivated by morality, because then they could be engaged in discussion. When your starting position is "there is no difference between an embryo and a human being, period" you preclude the possibility of anything like rational discussion and you're just trying to lay down the law. I have no use for people who try to lay down the law for all of us based on their religious rules.

It's just the US

[nicoleb_x]

Not to worry, the reset of the world can still do embryonic research.

Re:It's just the US

[kurokame]

Right, it's just NSF and DOH funding. Cutting it off will do absolutely nothing to prevent researchers from working on the subject. The expensive equipment will somehow turn up for free, the facilities bill will pay itself, and graduate students looking for a RA position won't mind that they can't get funding to pay for their tuition and room and board and medical and so forth if they work in such a lab - which won't do anything to curtail the production of future researchers in the general topic area.

It's just federal funding. Right?

Re:An (im)Modest Proposal

[offrdbandit]

Unfortunately your opinion does not qualify you to dictate what is and is not morally or ethically acceptable behavior (neither does your political affiliation, nor having or not having a uterus, but then again, with simplistic reasoning such as yours, I'm not surprised you've resorted to chauvinism). Saying "it's science" or "it's progress" doesn't answer the question of whether it *SHOULD* be done... Throughout history there have been countless examples of clearly ethically dubious behavior and even blatant atrocities in an attempt to illicit some scientific "advancement" of one form or another. You don't want to debate the morality of the destruction of embryos. You want to castigate anyone who disagrees with you and frame them as somehow anti-Science. It's asinine and you (should) know it.

More complicated than you think

[fysician]

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.

Place the blame where the blame belongs

[DesScorp]

(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.

How so?

[DesScorp]

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.

Re:How so?

[interkin3tic]

Isolate a population of adult neural stem cells in a person with a spinal cord injury, without resorting to homogenizing (grinding up) their brain for FACS and I'll admit that maybe adult stem cell technology will be good enough for therapy.

Otherwise, yeah, adult stem cells are convenient to some things, but are not the end all be all you're suggesting they are. We had good advances with carriage technology a long time before we got the internal combustion engine working, but it would have been extremely shortsighted to suggest that we shouldn't research internal combustion engines.

Furthermore, from a research standpoint, ESC are absolutely indispensable. You can't use adult stem cells to study early development.

Re:Federal funds used to destroy embryos...

[interkin3tic]

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.

Re:Federal funds used to destroy embryos...

[Tanktalus]

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.

Re:Federal funds used to destroy embryos...

[ultranova]

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.

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.

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?

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.