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NIH Orders Halt To Embryonic Stem Cell Research
sciencehabit writes "Responding to a court order issued a week ago, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) on Friday ordered intramural researchers studying human embryonic stem cells (hESCs) to shut down their experiments. NIH's action — probably unprecedented in its history — is a response to a preliminary injunction on 23 August from US District Judge Royce Lamberth. The judge ruled that the Obama policy allowing NIH funding to be used to study hESC lines violates a law prohibiting the use of federal funds to destroy embryos."
The judge ruled that the Obama policy allowing NIH funding to be used to study hESC lines violates a law prohibiting the use of federal funds to destroy embryos."
What if the scientists just charge for the research, but present an itemized bill that throws in the embryo destruction for free?
I'm mostly kidding, but isn't there some decent way to weasel around this?
Everyone who is against stem cell research should be unable to ever benefit from the results of said research.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
I'm pretty sure it applies to all of them; IIRC, the judge found that not only the Obama-era but also the Bush-era research violated the law. TFA seems to indicate that all hESC research under the auspices of NIH is covered by the order.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
That's not exactly the problem. It what happens after the Egg + Sperm stage. The some magic occurs and you have a proto human that various and sundry groups are trying to give full human rights to. Exactly when the embryo becomes legally human is the issue. Not whether or not you can pretend that your travels to the darker side of the Internet is somehow helping the human condition.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
That's missing the point entirely.
This is more or less the same debate as over early abortions and chemical contraceptives, it's about when your genetic material becomes an independent and legally protected person. Unless you're suggesting that the libertarian approach is to let people sell their children thus making the question irrelevant, you need to set some defined boundaries of personhood and embryohood.
Why must your beliefs mandate that another individual fund (via mandatory taxation) research they view as fundamentally unethical?
I think the answer has to simply be: that's where we've chosen to draw the line in our Constitution.
That is to say, we've set it up so that (in theory), the majority doesn't get to take your individual rights away, but they do get to decide what we collectively spend money on. (And in that context, I don't consider anyone to have a right to not have their tax dollars spent on something the majority agrees with, excepting, of course, when it abridges another individual right.)
Overall I think that strikes a pretty good compromise between a government that can't do anything (even when it should) and a government that can do too much. It's not perfect, but it beats any alternative we've tried so far.
It's not necessarily that. The belief that a fertilized embryo is a human isn't necessarily linked to religion (and I'm not sure how anyone can assume that link). I'm personally not religious, but I do hold that belief.
We're not talking creationist "maybe some guy in the sky created everything but we can't prove it" sort of ideology here. We're talking about a BIOLOGICALLY IDENTIFIABLE marker in the stage of the creation of a new life: the fertilization of of a cell and the forming of a unique DNA sequence. To me as a non-religious person that is actually a much less vague point of definition as to use birth as the marker is too variable - a baby can be born at 5 months into the term or 10 months into the term and still survive in some cases. Some say viability outside of the womb, but the reality is that NO baby is self-sufficient outside of the womb (all of them need additional assistance from others). Even if you take it down to the level of "able to survive with external assistance outside of the womb" then you have a situation that will vary depending on the technological environment present. A baby born in a well-equipped modern NICU can survive MUCH earlier than one born into a 3rd world backwater.
In short, completely aside from religion, fertilization seems to me like the most obvious point to declare a human life as started without getting into judgement calls and gray areas. Now, that may make certain research topics difficult, but that's the way things are. Experimentation on live humans would likely allow much faster progress too, but we as a society have agreed that the ethical implications of such research outweigh any potential gains.
Indeed I find it much LESS scientific of a matter when many people's definitions basically boil down to condition that "it's not a human if I can't hear it complain", which to me is more of an emotional definition than a scientific one.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
So when will they put a halt to all IVF treatments that destroy embryos?
The fact that this can be applied very very broadly is a reason to worry, and hope.
Don't know something? Look it up. Still don't know? Then ask.
Your two implications are inherently self contradicting. If, as you imply in your oh so clever "Osama, Obama" inference, Obama is a closet conservative Muslim, then he would object to your second inference. Since conservatives Muslims, like conservative Christians, are generally anti-abortion.
I don't need a million points of light, just two points of multi-mode fiber and a 10 Gig-E router.
Not to get in the way of a good old-fashioned America-bashing comment but if you think China is going to be a center of learning and research then that's just ignorant and wrong. They have huge problems, much worse than popularly believed, which are never reported by any media. However, and I see this all the time, Americaphobes typically look to China for relief and project their feelings onto it. The highly educated and frustrated are highly vulnerable to this malady. China is China, they don't give a shit about what anyone thinks about them. For research? I've seen it again and again, Chinese typically don't do new things, they look around for what someone has done before and copy it. Learn about Confucianism some time.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!