Oh. I feel silly for not thinking of that. All I could come up with was "vagina."
Ana Marie isn't a vixen. She's a shrew. She's an oversexed, underinformed shrew who learned a long time ago that she wasn't pretty enough to get by on looks alone, so she decided to really slut it up to slide her way through life.
Google News is still filtered by human beings. It's just that the filtering happens a little further up the chain.
For instance, it was once the case --I hope and pray that it's no longer so, for obvious reasons-- that propaganda sites like Indymedia and the Daily Kos were credentialed by Google News. Go to Google News and you might see a "Bush was AWOL!!" or "America = TERRORIST" agitprop story in nice, bold type.
I believe this obvious error has been corrected, but I won't vouch for it. Frankly I stopped using Google News about the time the mistake was made, and my habits changed in such a way that I was never motivated to go back.
The other problem with Google News --and it's a doozy -- is that, of those 523 related stories, 498 of them are the exact same AP news wire copy from 498 different newspapers and Web sites.
Have you ever actually been to Matt Drudge's Web site? There's hardly ever any original writing on it. Right this second, the above-the-fold items are both links to AP wire stories.
A newborn certainly is more sentient than a zygote.
Oh, lord. First there was talk of sentience, and now it's sentience on a sliding scale? You're dealing with a concept that doesn't even have a useful definition, and you're trying to establish degrees. Is the abject absurdity of this really lost on you?
Where did this whole "sentience" idea come from, anyway? Is it possible that you've been reading too much bad science fiction? They call it fiction for a reason, you know.
Unborn brainless human collections of cells, however
You misspelled "babies."
I think awareness develops when the brain starts operating
So sometime around age one, then? Say somewhere between twelve and eighteen months? Before that, grind 'em up to bake your bread, right?
If we're going to play the game
We're not.
If an embryo is not a baby
That's like saying, "If a tail is a leg," or "If the sky is purple and full of can openers." It's a hypothetical contrary to fact. (Which, incidentally, means it's also grammatically incorrect. We use the subjunctive when discussing hypotheticals contrary to fact. You'd say, "If an embryo were not a baby.")
let's only do research on non-sentient babies.
That's a meaningless sentence. "Sentient" is a word we can't even define in any useful sense, nor can we test against it. In order to determine who is an who isn't sentient -- or, according to what you said earlier, who's more or less sentient --we basically have to take your word for it.
The mass media is also filled with misinformation. Worse, it's often filled with disinformation: false information that's deliberately used to mislead or confuse. See Mapes, Mary.
If you're looking for a reason why blogs are inferior to the mass media, you're going to have to dig deeper.
Actually, most of the reporting coming out of Ukraine is coming in blog form. While the AP has a three-man bureau in Kyiv and the New York Times has a couple of stringers in the country, the vast majority of the actual first-person reporting is coming out via the dozens of blogs maintained either by Ukrainians or by Westerners who are living there.
Interestingly, the same is true of both Iraq and Iran, although there's recently been a huge crackdown in Iran.
I for one, think "ethics" only have a place when you can speak of true life meaning, when there is actual brain activity.
Well, fortunately you're not making the rules. We don't accept a criteria for deciding that some people are worthy of ethical consideration and others aren't. Human societies have tried that sort of approach in the past; the results have been mass sterilizations and mass graves and millions upon millions lost.
Fortunately you're not making the rules.
when does abortion become "unethical"?
Abortion is always unethical. That doesn't necessarily mean that it's always wrong or always illegal, or even always immoral. It's just always unethical. It runs counter to medical ethics, the first precept of which is that doctors shall do no harm.
Um. No. Embryonic stem cells compose the very innermost lining of a structure called a blastocyst. A blastocyst the word we use to describe a baby at a very early stage of growth. It consists of a sort of hollow sphere of cells, some of which will develop into the placenta and umbilicus and other associated structures. On the inner wall of the blastocyst are embryonic stem cells. To harvest these cells, the blastocyst is literally sliced open and the cells extracted. The remains, the vast bulk of the baby at that point, are discarded.
Extremely premature births are (sometimes) not caused by any medically detectable trauma
Did you miss the word "healthy" or did you just choose to ignore it? By definition, a baby that is born at 28 weeks is not healthy.
An embryo is merely a group of cells with the potential to become a baby.
No, an embryo is a baby. It's a baby in a very early stage of growth. Hell, by your logic, a nine-year-old is just a really, really big group of cells with the potential to become a person. I think you'd have a hard time selling that to...well, to anybody.
An aborted foetus will NEVER become a baby.
An aborted fetus is a baby. It will never become an adult, however.
Why do you not go further and state that "an embryo is an adult"?
Um. Duh. Because an adult is a person who's passed the age of majority. Are you trying to play a clever word game? Or are you just a dumbass?
I gave sentience as an example of a very significant difference between an embryo, and what people usually think of as babies
But that's the thing, you see: You're wrong. Children under the age of one are not sentient, as near as we can tell given that the term itself has basically no rigorous meaning and that, if it did, it would be utterly untestable.
And yes, if it were proven that babies were not sentient, then I wouldn't have a problem with people killing them.
I'm pretty sure that makes you a monster.
Wait. Hang on a sec. Before we go any further: How old are you? If you're too young for your reproductive instincts to have kicked in yet, that'll explain a lot.
babies have functioning brains, unlike embryos which have nothing of the sort
So so far you've implied that it's okay to kill babies and people with brain damage or organic brain disorders. Anybody else you wanna get rid of?
Look, I understand that you're being sincere and all that, but you DO know enough basic history to realize that societies that have chosen to make such life-and-death decisions have rapidly spiraled into the deepest sorts of depravity, don't you? We're talking mass holocausts here. Five million, ten million, fifty million dead. Are you prepared to go down that road again, just trusting that this time we'll know where to stop?
You brought up the definitions game, by claiming that embryos are babies
What does "the definitions game" mean? If it means quoting dictionaries, then no, I certainly did not bring it up. That's not what dictionaries are for, man. But if it were, then I think I'd be the winner of that game, because the definition cited determined that unborn children are babies.
I don't consider an embryo to be a child either!
Well, I'm real close to not considering you human, either. Does that mean it's okay for me to argue for your summary execution? If your answer here is anything other than "no," I think you really need to reconsider your values system.
So the test is "sentience" now? Two things: First, please quit moving the goalposts. Second, surely a newborn is no more possessed of sentience than a newly fertilized zygote. There's absolutely no way to know for sure, but even the most optimistic estimates are that self-awareness doesn't begin to emerge until after the first year of life. Are babies younger than one year of age not really babies? Should it be okay to kill them?
Citing a dictionary, incidentally, is an excellent way of demonstrating that you have no idea what the conversation is really about, or for that matter what dictionaries are for. But since you brought it up, definition #1 is "a very young child." Embryos naturally meet this standard. The second definition you cited specifically mentions the unborn; the unborn, by your own ill-chosen source, are babies.
An embryo is no more a baby than a child is an adult.
Of course this statement is obviously false. The correct analogy is "embryo is to baby as child is to person."
No, left to "its own devices" an embryo will die.
You are clearly confused. A healthy embryo left in the womb and not subjected to trauma will, in all cases, develop into an adult human being. An unhealthy embryo, of course, will die; that's part of the natural process.
You're just a bit confused, I think. Nothing to be ashamed of. There's so much disinformation flying around out there it's a miracle anybody has his head screwed on straight any more.
Ah, but you see, many of those who don't see a problem with embryonic stem cell research don't view it that way.
If you call a tail a leg, how many legs does a dog have? Five, you say? No, the answer is four: calling a tail a leg doesn't make it so.
You can refer to an embryo in whatever clinical, dehumanizing terms you want. Call it a "scrap of tissue," call it a "bunch of cells," call it an "unwanted growth." Applying these names doesn't change the essential fact that an embryo is a baby.
Likewise, calling it a difference over terminology or conflicting worldviews or whatever doesn't change the essential fact that embryonic stem cells are harvested from the corpses of dead babies.
Does that terminology make you squeamish? Rightly so! The killing of a baby for medical research, even if justified by the possibility of wonderful results, should never be undertaken lightly. We must always stop and say, "Woah, is this really something we want to do?" before becoming 21st-century Dr. Mengeles.
Hiding the essential fact of the experiment behind verbiage --it's "just tissue" --is a great way to become a monster without ever realizing it.
I think that's what Bush has been trying to do (at least that's what he says he's trying to do), and it makes sense to me to look for some sort of a balance.
Agreed, absolutely. The correct balance is what everybody's looking for.
the strength of stem cells in treatments seem to be that they are not yet differentiated
That's a much more complicated issue than you might think. There are lots of different kinds of stem cells. The ones you find in babies are called pluripotent: they can become any type of cell found in the body, under the right conditions. The ones you find in adults (like in bone marrow) are called multipotent. They can become any one of a specific set of cell types. Bone marrow stem cells, for instance, can become any kind of blood cell.
To take advantage of adult stem cells, basically all you have to do is take them out of a donor and put them in a recipient. This is what we do in a bone marrow transplant. In fact, the body "auto-transplants" bone marrow stem cells when the marrow is diseased; that's why people with diseases of the bone marrow develop splenomegaly. The stem cells are migrating from the bone marrow to the spleen where they keep right on producing blood cells.
But the thing is, there's no environment in the body where you can drop a pluripotent stem cell and have it turn into something useful. Usually it just turns into a teratoma. If your patient is very lucky, the cells will just die.
So right now there is ZERO medical use for pluripotent --i.e., embryonic --stem cells, but there is extensive use for multipotent stem cells.
I appreciate the effort, but you need to learn a LOT more about stem cells, I think. You've got some of the basic ideas right, but others you've got very wrong. (Like the idea that we've only been using stem cells therapeutically recently. In fact, we've been doing stem-cell transplants for more than 30 years.)
act of destroying embryos, itself, is ethically dicey
Correct.
he doesn't want the government to be encouraging it (by funding it) unless it's really necessary
Also correct, except for your word "necessary." It'll never be necessary to kill a baby. It may be beneficial in ways that outweigh the obvious ethical problems, however. It's the classic brain-twister: If you could save a thousand people by killing one baby, would you? Well, the problem is that we don't know whether killing that baby would save lives. We need to find out, but if we go ahead and kill the baby and it turns out we were wrong, we will have committed a great crime against humanity.
many people think of "embryos" as "little babies"
Embryos are little babies. It's not so much a matter of a point of view as it is a matter of dispassionately facing up to an uncomfortable fact of life.
Those concerns are accentuated by the hope that similar results may be possible by using relatively small tissue samples from adults instead.
Ah, you have that backwards, I think. See, we already use adult stem cells to treat lots of maladies. Some scientists hope that stem cells harvested from babies can be used to treat even more maladies, but that sort of begs the important ethical questions. The science-fiction, blue-sky ideal is that we can harvest some stem cells from babies then culture those cells in the lab, growing them just like we grow brewer's yeast. This hasn't proven to be possible, however, so even if it turns out that embryonic stem cells are magical cure-alls, we're still going to be faced with the necessity of having to grind up babies to get them.
I think maybe you're confused. Embryonic stem cells are harvested through the destruction of living embryos. That's how we get them: by destroying living embryos. Embryos are destroyed, and then the stem cells are picked out of the remains.
Shouting about it isn't going to make it so. An embryo is a baby. An embryo is a human being in a particular stage of development. As much as you might like to characterize it as "just a bunch of cells" or whatever, it's still a baby.
I find it hard to belive a reasonable person cannot differentiate between embryos and babies.
An embryo is a type of baby. During a particular stage in the baby's development, we refer to it by the term "embryo." There is no distinction between a baby and an embryo, because one is a specific type of the other. Understand now?
An embryo is not life
Why not? It grows. It requires nourishment. Left to its own devices, it will develop into an adult human being with a driver's license and credit cards and a video club membership. Why is an embryo not life?
no amount of insisting by you fucking zealots will EVER change my mind, so don't bother.
Sounds like you might be a little backwards on the question of which of us is the more zealous.
We who? And how, exactly, do you measure the "brainwaves" (ugh) of an embryo anyway? Do you get into the womb with little tiny electrodes?
A baby is an immature human being. It's not a technical term. So yes, the harvesting of embryonic stem cells does involve the killing of babies.
a hold on all stemcell research on -new- fetusses
No. There is no ban on such research. The NIH has been instructed not to extend funding to projects that harvest new embryonic stem cell lines --i.e., that kill babies --but there is no ban on conducting such research with private funds.
IV conception
It took me a minute to translate this into English. I think you mean "in vitro fertilization," not "IV conception."
One particular technique for in vitro fertilization involves the production of many embryos. This is an ethically troublesome technique that's generally frowned upon by the medical community. This technique is, in all likelihood, on the way to being phased out in favor of more ethically sound techniques.
The President's position, officially, is that the harvesting of embryonic stem cells when there is no -- zero--no scientific evidence of medical use for them is ethically dicey. Therefore, federal funding is available for any type of stem cell research anybody wants to conduct except research that involves the harvesting of stem cells through the destruction of living embryos.
Existing cell lines are available for research, and at such time as that research indicates potential medical uses for embryonic stem cells, the President will reconsider the funding policy.
Let us not neglect to point out that so far pluripotent stem cells have been useful for precisely one thing: giving mice cancer.
Multipotent stem cells have had legitimate medical uses for decades, the best known being the use of bone-marrow transplants to treat diseases of the blood. Pluripotent stem cells have never demonstrated any clinical potential. But everybody likes to talk about them because, frankly, the advocates of embryonic stem cell research have good PR.
It's also worth mentioning that the huge flap over Vioxx boils down to a one point eight percent increase in incidence in a very specifically defined segment of the drug's patient population. That's the kind of trade-off that, in years past, would have gone completely unnoticed. Today it's front-page news.
George Bush didn't outlaw Steam Cell Research; He ceased giving federal funding for new steam cell lines
Um. No. Before the first Bush term, there was no federal funding for stem cell research at all, embryonic or otherwise, new cell lines or old. In think it was in 2001 that Bush first authorized the use of federal funds for stem cell research, with the limitation that those funds could only go toward research on existing cell lines.
Bush didn't cease doing anything. He didn't (as one of your respondents says) cut off funding for anything. He started funding stem cell research. He just didn't fund all types of stem cell research.
stem cells are often left over from invitro fertilization
Wow. That is, by far, the most egregious instance of obfuscation I've ever seen. Stem cells are "left over?" Yes, they're "left over" in the sense that they're part of embryos that were created as part of an ethically dubious "create lots of babies and then discard most of them" in vitro fertilization technique.
That's kind of like saying that your pancreas is "left over" from a human reproductive process.
In order to debate the science and the medical ethics, we have to get away from this sort of deliberate misrepresentation. Embryonic stem cells are harvested through the destruction of living human embryos. Before we can have a conversation about the merits of that act, we have to first acknowledge the act.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh. I feel silly for not thinking of that. All I could come up with was "vagina."
Ana Marie isn't a vixen. She's a shrew. She's an oversexed, underinformed shrew who learned a long time ago that she wasn't pretty enough to get by on looks alone, so she decided to really slut it up to slide her way through life.
Not. A. Fan.
Google News is still filtered by human beings. It's just that the filtering happens a little further up the chain.
For instance, it was once the case --I hope and pray that it's no longer so, for obvious reasons-- that propaganda sites like Indymedia and the Daily Kos were credentialed by Google News. Go to Google News and you might see a "Bush was AWOL!!" or "America = TERRORIST" agitprop story in nice, bold type.
I believe this obvious error has been corrected, but I won't vouch for it. Frankly I stopped using Google News about the time the mistake was made, and my habits changed in such a way that I was never motivated to go back.
The other problem with Google News --and it's a doozy -- is that, of those 523 related stories, 498 of them are the exact same AP news wire copy from 498 different newspapers and Web sites.
Have you ever actually been to Matt Drudge's Web site? There's hardly ever any original writing on it. Right this second, the above-the-fold items are both links to AP wire stories.
Matt's an aggregator.
And you're an idiot.
I don't get the joke. What's the v-word she's fond of being called?
A newborn certainly is more sentient than a zygote.
Oh, lord. First there was talk of sentience, and now it's sentience on a sliding scale? You're dealing with a concept that doesn't even have a useful definition, and you're trying to establish degrees. Is the abject absurdity of this really lost on you?
Where did this whole "sentience" idea come from, anyway? Is it possible that you've been reading too much bad science fiction? They call it fiction for a reason, you know.
Unborn brainless human collections of cells, however
You misspelled "babies."
I think awareness develops when the brain starts operating
So sometime around age one, then? Say somewhere between twelve and eighteen months? Before that, grind 'em up to bake your bread, right?
If we're going to play the game
We're not.
If an embryo is not a baby
That's like saying, "If a tail is a leg," or "If the sky is purple and full of can openers." It's a hypothetical contrary to fact. (Which, incidentally, means it's also grammatically incorrect. We use the subjunctive when discussing hypotheticals contrary to fact. You'd say, "If an embryo were not a baby.")
let's only do research on non-sentient babies.
That's a meaningless sentence. "Sentient" is a word we can't even define in any useful sense, nor can we test against it. In order to determine who is an who isn't sentient -- or, according to what you said earlier, who's more or less sentient --we basically have to take your word for it.
Nuh-uh. Ain't gonna happen.
The mass media is also filled with misinformation. Worse, it's often filled with disinformation: false information that's deliberately used to mislead or confuse. See Mapes, Mary.
If you're looking for a reason why blogs are inferior to the mass media, you're going to have to dig deeper.
They aren't about reporting the news
Actually, most of the reporting coming out of Ukraine is coming in blog form. While the AP has a three-man bureau in Kyiv and the New York Times has a couple of stringers in the country, the vast majority of the actual first-person reporting is coming out via the dozens of blogs maintained either by Ukrainians or by Westerners who are living there.
Interestingly, the same is true of both Iraq and Iran, although there's recently been a huge crackdown in Iran.
As opposed to accountable editorializing? When's the last time you saw your local newspaper run a signed editorial?
'No,' says Anna Marie Cox, author of Wonkette
Can somebody explain to me, please, why we're quoting a harpy whose chief claim to fame is dick and ass jokes?
"Is the economy improving? 'No,' says Lashonda Jefferson, whore who walks the corner of Sunset and 3rd."
Please.
I for one, think "ethics" only have a place when you can speak of true life meaning, when there is actual brain activity.
Well, fortunately you're not making the rules. We don't accept a criteria for deciding that some people are worthy of ethical consideration and others aren't. Human societies have tried that sort of approach in the past; the results have been mass sterilizations and mass graves and millions upon millions lost.
Fortunately you're not making the rules.
when does abortion become "unethical"?
Abortion is always unethical. That doesn't necessarily mean that it's always wrong or always illegal, or even always immoral. It's just always unethical. It runs counter to medical ethics, the first precept of which is that doctors shall do no harm.
Um. No. Embryonic stem cells compose the very innermost lining of a structure called a blastocyst. A blastocyst the word we use to describe a baby at a very early stage of growth. It consists of a sort of hollow sphere of cells, some of which will develop into the placenta and umbilicus and other associated structures. On the inner wall of the blastocyst are embryonic stem cells. To harvest these cells, the blastocyst is literally sliced open and the cells extracted. The remains, the vast bulk of the baby at that point, are discarded.
Extremely premature births are (sometimes) not caused by any medically detectable trauma
...well, to anybody.
Did you miss the word "healthy" or did you just choose to ignore it? By definition, a baby that is born at 28 weeks is not healthy.
An embryo is merely a group of cells with the potential to become a baby.
No, an embryo is a baby. It's a baby in a very early stage of growth. Hell, by your logic, a nine-year-old is just a really, really big group of cells with the potential to become a person. I think you'd have a hard time selling that to
An aborted foetus will NEVER become a baby.
An aborted fetus is a baby. It will never become an adult, however.
Why do you not go further and state that "an embryo is an adult"?
Um. Duh. Because an adult is a person who's passed the age of majority. Are you trying to play a clever word game? Or are you just a dumbass?
I gave sentience as an example of a very significant difference between an embryo, and what people usually think of as babies
But that's the thing, you see: You're wrong. Children under the age of one are not sentient, as near as we can tell given that the term itself has basically no rigorous meaning and that, if it did, it would be utterly untestable.
And yes, if it were proven that babies were not sentient, then I wouldn't have a problem with people killing them.
I'm pretty sure that makes you a monster.
Wait. Hang on a sec. Before we go any further: How old are you? If you're too young for your reproductive instincts to have kicked in yet, that'll explain a lot.
babies have functioning brains, unlike embryos which have nothing of the sort
So so far you've implied that it's okay to kill babies and people with brain damage or organic brain disorders. Anybody else you wanna get rid of?
Look, I understand that you're being sincere and all that, but you DO know enough basic history to realize that societies that have chosen to make such life-and-death decisions have rapidly spiraled into the deepest sorts of depravity, don't you? We're talking mass holocausts here. Five million, ten million, fifty million dead. Are you prepared to go down that road again, just trusting that this time we'll know where to stop?
You brought up the definitions game, by claiming that embryos are babies
What does "the definitions game" mean? If it means quoting dictionaries, then no, I certainly did not bring it up. That's not what dictionaries are for, man. But if it were, then I think I'd be the winner of that game, because the definition cited determined that unborn children are babies.
I don't consider an embryo to be a child either!
Well, I'm real close to not considering you human, either. Does that mean it's okay for me to argue for your summary execution? If your answer here is anything other than "no," I think you really need to reconsider your values system.
an embryo is not a sentient being
So the test is "sentience" now? Two things: First, please quit moving the goalposts. Second, surely a newborn is no more possessed of sentience than a newly fertilized zygote. There's absolutely no way to know for sure, but even the most optimistic estimates are that self-awareness doesn't begin to emerge until after the first year of life. Are babies younger than one year of age not really babies? Should it be okay to kill them?
Citing a dictionary, incidentally, is an excellent way of demonstrating that you have no idea what the conversation is really about, or for that matter what dictionaries are for. But since you brought it up, definition #1 is "a very young child." Embryos naturally meet this standard. The second definition you cited specifically mentions the unborn; the unborn, by your own ill-chosen source, are babies.
An embryo is no more a baby than a child is an adult.
Of course this statement is obviously false. The correct analogy is "embryo is to baby as child is to person."
No, left to "its own devices" an embryo will die.
You are clearly confused. A healthy embryo left in the womb and not subjected to trauma will, in all cases, develop into an adult human being. An unhealthy embryo, of course, will die; that's part of the natural process.
You're just a bit confused, I think. Nothing to be ashamed of. There's so much disinformation flying around out there it's a miracle anybody has his head screwed on straight any more.
Ah, but you see, many of those who don't see a problem with embryonic stem cell research don't view it that way.
If you call a tail a leg, how many legs does a dog have? Five, you say? No, the answer is four: calling a tail a leg doesn't make it so.
You can refer to an embryo in whatever clinical, dehumanizing terms you want. Call it a "scrap of tissue," call it a "bunch of cells," call it an "unwanted growth." Applying these names doesn't change the essential fact that an embryo is a baby.
Likewise, calling it a difference over terminology or conflicting worldviews or whatever doesn't change the essential fact that embryonic stem cells are harvested from the corpses of dead babies.
Does that terminology make you squeamish? Rightly so! The killing of a baby for medical research, even if justified by the possibility of wonderful results, should never be undertaken lightly. We must always stop and say, "Woah, is this really something we want to do?" before becoming 21st-century Dr. Mengeles.
Hiding the essential fact of the experiment behind verbiage --it's "just tissue" --is a great way to become a monster without ever realizing it.
I think that's what Bush has been trying to do (at least that's what he says he's trying to do), and it makes sense to me to look for some sort of a balance.
Agreed, absolutely. The correct balance is what everybody's looking for.
the strength of stem cells in treatments seem to be that they are not yet differentiated
That's a much more complicated issue than you might think. There are lots of different kinds of stem cells. The ones you find in babies are called pluripotent: they can become any type of cell found in the body, under the right conditions. The ones you find in adults (like in bone marrow) are called multipotent. They can become any one of a specific set of cell types. Bone marrow stem cells, for instance, can become any kind of blood cell.
To take advantage of adult stem cells, basically all you have to do is take them out of a donor and put them in a recipient. This is what we do in a bone marrow transplant. In fact, the body "auto-transplants" bone marrow stem cells when the marrow is diseased; that's why people with diseases of the bone marrow develop splenomegaly. The stem cells are migrating from the bone marrow to the spleen where they keep right on producing blood cells.
But the thing is, there's no environment in the body where you can drop a pluripotent stem cell and have it turn into something useful. Usually it just turns into a teratoma. If your patient is very lucky, the cells will just die.
So right now there is ZERO medical use for pluripotent --i.e., embryonic --stem cells, but there is extensive use for multipotent stem cells.
I appreciate the effort, but you need to learn a LOT more about stem cells, I think. You've got some of the basic ideas right, but others you've got very wrong. (Like the idea that we've only been using stem cells therapeutically recently. In fact, we've been doing stem-cell transplants for more than 30 years.)
act of destroying embryos, itself, is ethically dicey
Correct.
he doesn't want the government to be encouraging it (by funding it) unless it's really necessary
Also correct, except for your word "necessary." It'll never be necessary to kill a baby. It may be beneficial in ways that outweigh the obvious ethical problems, however. It's the classic brain-twister: If you could save a thousand people by killing one baby, would you? Well, the problem is that we don't know whether killing that baby would save lives. We need to find out, but if we go ahead and kill the baby and it turns out we were wrong, we will have committed a great crime against humanity.
many people think of "embryos" as "little babies"
Embryos are little babies. It's not so much a matter of a point of view as it is a matter of dispassionately facing up to an uncomfortable fact of life.
Those concerns are accentuated by the hope that similar results may be possible by using relatively small tissue samples from adults instead.
Ah, you have that backwards, I think. See, we already use adult stem cells to treat lots of maladies. Some scientists hope that stem cells harvested from babies can be used to treat even more maladies, but that sort of begs the important ethical questions. The science-fiction, blue-sky ideal is that we can harvest some stem cells from babies then culture those cells in the lab, growing them just like we grow brewer's yeast. This hasn't proven to be possible, however, so even if it turns out that embryonic stem cells are magical cure-alls, we're still going to be faced with the necessity of having to grind up babies to get them.
Bad news all around, really.
I think maybe you're confused. Embryonic stem cells are harvested through the destruction of living embryos. That's how we get them: by destroying living embryos. Embryos are destroyed, and then the stem cells are picked out of the remains.
THEY ARE NOT BABIES. THEY ARE EMBRYOS.
Shouting about it isn't going to make it so. An embryo is a baby. An embryo is a human being in a particular stage of development. As much as you might like to characterize it as "just a bunch of cells" or whatever, it's still a baby.
I find it hard to belive a reasonable person cannot differentiate between embryos and babies.
An embryo is a type of baby. During a particular stage in the baby's development, we refer to it by the term "embryo." There is no distinction between a baby and an embryo, because one is a specific type of the other. Understand now?
An embryo is not life
Why not? It grows. It requires nourishment. Left to its own devices, it will develop into an adult human being with a driver's license and credit cards and a video club membership. Why is an embryo not life?
no amount of insisting by you fucking zealots will EVER change my mind, so don't bother.
Sounds like you might be a little backwards on the question of which of us is the more zealous.
we call it a baby when the brainwaves start
We who? And how, exactly, do you measure the "brainwaves" (ugh) of an embryo anyway? Do you get into the womb with little tiny electrodes?
A baby is an immature human being. It's not a technical term. So yes, the harvesting of embryonic stem cells does involve the killing of babies.
a hold on all stemcell research on -new- fetusses
No. There is no ban on such research. The NIH has been instructed not to extend funding to projects that harvest new embryonic stem cell lines --i.e., that kill babies --but there is no ban on conducting such research with private funds.
IV conception
It took me a minute to translate this into English. I think you mean "in vitro fertilization," not "IV conception."
One particular technique for in vitro fertilization involves the production of many embryos. This is an ethically troublesome technique that's generally frowned upon by the medical community. This technique is, in all likelihood, on the way to being phased out in favor of more ethically sound techniques.
An eensy-weensy clarification.
The President's position, officially, is that the harvesting of embryonic stem cells when there is no -- zero--no scientific evidence of medical use for them is ethically dicey. Therefore, federal funding is available for any type of stem cell research anybody wants to conduct except research that involves the harvesting of stem cells through the destruction of living embryos.
Existing cell lines are available for research, and at such time as that research indicates potential medical uses for embryonic stem cells, the President will reconsider the funding policy.
Let us not neglect to point out that so far pluripotent stem cells have been useful for precisely one thing: giving mice cancer.
Multipotent stem cells have had legitimate medical uses for decades, the best known being the use of bone-marrow transplants to treat diseases of the blood. Pluripotent stem cells have never demonstrated any clinical potential. But everybody likes to talk about them because, frankly, the advocates of embryonic stem cell research have good PR.
Bravo!
It's also worth mentioning that the huge flap over Vioxx boils down to a one point eight percent increase in incidence in a very specifically defined segment of the drug's patient population. That's the kind of trade-off that, in years past, would have gone completely unnoticed. Today it's front-page news.
George Bush didn't outlaw Steam Cell Research; He ceased giving federal funding for new steam cell lines
Um. No. Before the first Bush term, there was no federal funding for stem cell research at all, embryonic or otherwise, new cell lines or old. In think it was in 2001 that Bush first authorized the use of federal funds for stem cell research, with the limitation that those funds could only go toward research on existing cell lines.
Bush didn't cease doing anything. He didn't (as one of your respondents says) cut off funding for anything. He started funding stem cell research. He just didn't fund all types of stem cell research.
stem cells are often left over from invitro fertilization
Wow. That is, by far, the most egregious instance of obfuscation I've ever seen. Stem cells are "left over?" Yes, they're "left over" in the sense that they're part of embryos that were created as part of an ethically dubious "create lots of babies and then discard most of them" in vitro fertilization technique.
That's kind of like saying that your pancreas is "left over" from a human reproductive process.
In order to debate the science and the medical ethics, we have to get away from this sort of deliberate misrepresentation. Embryonic stem cells are harvested through the destruction of living human embryos. Before we can have a conversation about the merits of that act, we have to first acknowledge the act.