Comments | grouchyoldcoot: And the bad guys win again.

grouchyoldcoot

And the bad guys win again.

Aug 24, 2010 02:00

You may recall that back in March Obama lifted Bush's executive order banning NIH funding for embryonic stem cell research, and Bush's ban on using ESC lines which had been grown without mouse cell media (and so were unsuitable for use in medicine). And you may recall that the NIH then went on to develop guidelines for the extraction of ESCs from ( Read more... )

Comments 4

damedini August 24 2010, 12:33:30 UTC

Maybe if your "dead people's" families sue. It wouldn't win them anything, but maybe emphasize that the research is important.

Although, to these nutballs, the life of a ball of cells that might become a baby seems to be more important than those of living, suffering humans.

hildakrista August 24 2010, 12:52:45 UTC

It's all about fear.

grouchyoldcoot August 24 2010, 16:29:05 UTC

I don't think it is, Hilda. In Sherley's case it's clearly not about fear, it's about his sense of entitlement. In Deisher's case, she's devoted her life to saving helpless embryos, and she's got an opportunity to impose her belief set of a few hundred million other people. The judges of the Appeals Court were quite deliberately subjected to the 'litmus test' on abortion which the Bush administration applied to all candidates for the Federal bench. That litmus test was not about fear, it was about self-righteousness and social domination. Saying it's about fear excuses it- it makes them seem like scared children. This is not done out of panic. You Christians out there- if you want to know why your religion has become so hated, well, this is why.

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grouchyoldcoot August 29 2010, 05:54:23 UTC

Yeah, well, I have to disagree with that. Adult stem cell lines are useful, but they are tissue-specific and they don't grow well in culture. If you want to implant CNS neural stem cells, you're going to have to start culturing from a biopsy of the patient's cerebral ventricular wall- not the sort of thing that's going to be popular with grandma. Plus, all that we've learned about the differentiation patterns which connect these cell types, we've learned from embryonic stem cells- and we can no longer study those. We don't know enough to know what cell types will work for what yet. And yes, it will take years to figure them out, but that countdown isn't running- there are currently *zero* embryonic stem cell lines available. Lamberth's ruling precludes use of the Bush lines as well, plus a number of tissue cultures used for vaccine development which were derived from aborted fetal tissue ( ... )