Rev. Falwell decries stem cell research

[Corinthian™]

sometimes I wish people were amoral droids

 

[Anita18]

I couldn't use embryonic stem cells for anything, even if my life depended on it.

It's kind of out your hands, dude, since scientists use stem cells to discover how things like cancer, diabetes, etc, develop. With that knowledge, drugs could be made to make treatments more successful. It isn't like, "We use stem cells directly for blah blah blah." It's way more general than that. That means, if you've got diabetes or cancer, you'd better be willing to die a slow painful death without treatments. (Well, okay I'm exaggerating here. But I hear chemo's really no walk in the park.)

I guess I'm biased, since I'm a scientist and I work (currently) on mouse embryonic stem cells. We don't kill any mice ourselves - we were given a vial and we grow them. But once we exhaust the knowledge we can gleam from mouse stem cells, there comes a time where we'll have to test them on human cells. It's just the way it is - mice aren't the same as humans and we certainly don't want (nor are we allowed to) test these things on live human beings.

I can see an argument against growing fetuses just for their stem cells. That creeps me out. But I think that we could have done a lot with the bill Bush vetoed recently. I mean, face it, many many MANY extra embryos from fertility clinics are THROWN AWAY every day. Newsweek had a number, like...less than 0.06% are eventually adopted. I mean, if they were gonna be disposed of anyway, what's the harm in using the frozen cells for research to help people who are dying?

I guess I also may be biased because not only am I a scientist, but I work at a cancer research hospital. I see people in wheelchairs and face masks every day. People who have no hair, and who need canes to walk because their treatments have left them so weak. I want to help them, and this is honestly the best way to acquire the knowledge that we need.

For what it's worth, the scientific definition of pregnancy begins at implantation. Naturally, about 80% of conceptions don't even implant because of some reason or another. The woman's hormones are off. The sperm was deficient. The zygote developed funny. The list goes on and on. Or, as my prof used to say, "The worlds biggest abortionist is God."

 

[Man-Thing]

It's kind of out your hands, dude, since scientists use stem cells to discover how things like cancer, diabetes, etc, develop. With that knowledge, drugs could be made to make treatments more successful. It isn't like, "We use stem cells directly for blah blah blah." It's way more general than that. That means, if you've got diabetes or cancer, you'd better be willing to die a slow painful death without treatments. (Well, okay I'm exaggerating here. But I hear chemo's really no walk in the park.)

I guess I'm biased, since I'm a scientist and I work (currently) on mouse embryonic stem cells. We don't kill any mice ourselves - we were given a vial and we grow them. But once we exhaust the knowledge we can gleam from mouse stem cells, there comes a time where we'll have to test them on human cells. It's just the way it is - mice aren't the same as humans and we certainly don't want (nor are we allowed to) test these things on live human beings.

I can see an argument against growing fetuses just for their stem cells. That creeps me out. But I think that we could have done a lot with the bill Bush vetoed recently. I mean, face it, many many MANY extra embryos from fertility clinics are THROWN AWAY every day. Newsweek had a number, like...less than 0.06% are eventually adopted. I mean, if they were gonna be disposed of anyway, what's the harm in using the frozen cells for research to help people who are dying?

I guess I also may be biased because not only am I a scientist, but I work at a cancer research hospital. I see people in wheelchairs and face masks every day. People who have no hair, and who need canes to walk because their treatments have left them so weak. I want to help them, and this is honestly the best way to acquire the knowledge that we need.

For what it's worth, the scientific definition of pregnancy begins at implantation. Naturally, about 80% of conceptions don't even implant because of some reason or another. The woman's hormones are off. The sperm was deficient. The zygote developed funny. The list goes on and on. Or, as my prof used to say, "The worlds biggest abortionist is God."

how many diseases have been cured because of embrionic stemcell research?

 

[Tangled Web]

Falwell also doesn't believe that gays are human.

Falwell is a ****ing idiot.

 

[Addendum]

how many diseases have been cured because of embrionic stemcell research?

And what is the harm in having research to see if it's a viable source for cures? If not, then you look in another area.

 

[Corinthian™]

how many diseases have been cured because of embrionic stemcell research?

how many diseases have been cured by non-embryonic stem research

Uhm.. you are an idiot if you expect short term results with those kinds of researches

 

[Man-Thing]

how many diseases have been cured by non-embryonic stem research

Adult Stem Cells: 3, Embryonic Stems cells: 0


Adult Stem Cells
1.

2.

3.

Whereas...

Embryonic Stems cells
1.

2.

3. (with empahsis on "almost walk again")

Uhm.. you are an idiot if you expect short term results with those kinds of researches

I think a monkey could sit in a room a write War and Peace before there are any advances made for embryonic stem cell research that equal to the advances made by adult stem cell research.

 

[Man-Thing]

And what is the harm in having research to see if it's a viable source for cures? If not, then you look in another area.

The post I replied to Corinthian with pretty much shows that adult stem cell research is better, so we should look there.

 

[Tangled Web]

If the fetus is already dead, why not use it's body for research? That way it won't be like the baby died in vain.

 

[Tangled Web]

*throws up

 

[Addendum]

The post I replied to Corinthian with pretty much shows that adult stem cell research is better, so we should look there.

I still don't see a reason to place limits on research

 

[Tangled Web]

With your avvy, that works very well.

 

[Drakon]

Hey Carter, I've got one!


What do you get when you cross crude [and very inappropriate] jokes [especially considering the personal situations of one of our staff members], an overly cocky attitude, and apparently a pedophile asking teenage girls for naked pics?

The answer? Banned!

 

[Addendum]

Drakon made a funnie

 

[Man-Thing]

I still don't see a reason to place limits on research

well, you don't think that it's the killing of a human being do you?

 

[Addendum]

So where's the human in this picture?

Or is the human in this one?

 

[jaguarr]

sometimes I wish people were amoral droids

Who says I'm not? Beepity beep-beep suck my data output port!

jag

 

[Themanofbat]

There's already an effective treatment for diabetes invented in Alberta and it uses no embryos.

I couldn't use embryonic stem cells for anything, even if my life depended on it.

Ahhhh, the Edmonton islet research... ground-breaking stuff

Unfortunately, after a successful first year treatment, many patients in the second, as much as 70%, had fallen nack on insulin injection dependance.

So there's still a LOT of of work and research needed.

 

[Caliber]

Wait until he needs some medical research to help with some aliment that he develops... like diabetes... and then he might change his tune.

F***king religious zealots!!!

Only if it were a perfect world and that happen.

 

[celldog]

Anyone remember this little Stem cell scandal??



STEM CELLS:
How Young Korean Researchers Helped Unearth a Scandal …
Sei Chong and Dennis Normile*
SEOUL AND TOKYO--The announcement delivered a devastating blow to stem cell researchers around the world: On 29 December, a Seoul National University (SNU) investigative team said there was no evidence Woo Suk Hwang and his team had produced any of the patient-specific stem cells they described in a June 2005 Science paper. Many Koreans lamented that the revelations dashed the country's hopes for worldwide scientific respect. But the report also vindicated dozens of anonymous young Korean scientists who, without knowing one another, worked together and with the media to unravel a huge scientific fraud.

Two papers published in Science by Hwang and colleagues at several institutions in Korea and the United States were hailed as seminal breakthroughs in stem cell research. A March 2004 paper reported the first stem cell line produced from a cloned human embryo. The second paper, published in May 2005, reported the creation of 11 stem cell lines that genetically matched nine patients with spinal cord injury, diabetes, and an immune system disorder. Scientists hope such stem cells could someday lead to insights into many hereditary conditions as well as the creation of replacement tissues genetically matched to patients.

Those hopes, however, began to unravel shortly after midnight on 1 June 2005, when someone sent a message to the "tip off " mailbox on the Web site of a long-running investigative TV news program called PD Notebook aired by the Seoul-based Munhwa Broadcasting Corp. (MBC). According to one of the program's producers, Bo Seul Kim, the writer said his conscience had been bothering him over problems he knew of with Hwang's research. Asking PD Notebook to contact him, he closed his message by writing: "I hope you don't refuse this offer to get at the truth."

They didn't. When PD Notebook executive producer Seung Ho Choi read the message several days later, he asked producer Hak Soo Han to meet the tipster that night. According to Han's recollection of the meeting, the tipster said he had been involved in the research leading to Hwang's 2004 paper in Science. He agreed to an interview on tape as long as his identity was concealed, during which he said he had left the team because of ethical and technical concerns. He claimed that despite Hwang's statements to the contrary, some of the eggs used for that research came from junior researchers in Hwang's lab. Producer Kim says the scientist provided names, donation records, and an e-mail message he had received from one of the researchers saying she had donated eggs under pressure from Hwang. The tipster also claimed that based on his knowledge of the team's work, Hwang couldn't have produced the patient-specific stem cells reported in the 2005 paper, although he admitted having no hard evidence of fabrication.


Clear misconduct. Jung Hye Roe, SNU's dean of research affairs, announced that the investigative committee found no evidence of cloned stem cells in Hwang's lab.
CREDIT: JUNG YEON-JE/AFP/GETTY IMAGES


"It was very difficult for me to believe what this person was suggesting," Han told Science. But the tipster's documentation of problems surrounding egg donations seemed trustworthy. So Han decided to look into the 2005 paper as well. The producers persuaded two others with inside knowledge of Hwang's lab to help. Han also recruited three scientists from outside the Hwang team as consultants.
Han says the PD Notebook team and its advisers began to identify potential problems with the paper, using tactics that they later conceded were journalistically unethical. Claiming they were working on a documentary about Korean biotechnology, PD Notebook reporters interviewed co-authors of the 2005 paper and found that the majority had never actually seen the cloned embryonic stem cells. The TV crew also learned from their advisers that teratomas, benign tumors that embryonic stem cells form when injected under the skin of experimental mice, had been produced only for stem cell lines 2 and 3; careful scientists would have produced teratomas from all 11 lines.

Kim says that because one of the informers suggested that the stem cell lines in the 2005 paper could have come from MizMedi Hospital in Seoul, the producers requested and received the DNA fingerprinting data for 15 lines derived at the hospital from embryos created through in vitro fertilization. Through one of their sources, the producers got a sample of stem cell line number 2 and passed it to an independent testing laboratory. The lab found that line number 2 genetically matched a MizMedi line. "Did we actually have evidence that Hwang faked his research?" Han recalls wondering. (SNU would come to the same conclusion months later, announcing on 29 December that stem cell lines 2 and 3 from Hwang's lab came from MizMedi's stem cells.)

Han says he got the news of the lab test results on 19 October while he was in the United States preparing to interview Sun Jong Kim, another co-author of the 2005 paper who had left MizMedi to join the University of Pittsburgh research team led by Gerald Schatten, a Hwang collaborator and co-author of the 2005 paper. In an attempt to get an admission of wrongdoing from Kim, Han says, the TV team resorted to some misrepresentation of its own. When the producers met him on 20 October, Han and his partner filmed Kim with a hidden camera; they didn't reply when he asked if they were recording him. In the interview, Han told Kim they had information that could prove Hwang's work was falsified. He also tricked Kim into believing that Korean prosecutors had begun an investigation and told Kim he didn't want to see him get hurt.


Speak no evil. MBC's initial broadcast on irregularities in egg donation for Hwang's research set off a wave of protests.
CREDIT: KIM JAE-HWAN/AFP/GETTY IMAGES


On hidden camera, Kim then told Han he followed directions from Hwang to make photographs of two cell lines appear to represent 11 cell lines. The falsified photos appear in the supplementary online material accompanying the 2005 Science paper. Han says he now "really repents" their unethical reporting ruses. And those lapses nearly led to their work being dismissed entirely.
But on 11 November, before PD Notebook broadcast any of its findings, Schatten announced he was terminating his relationship with Hwang because of concerns about "ethical breaches" in oocyte collection. Schatten emphasized that he was still confident of the research results. On 22 November, MBC broadcast the PD Notebook program containing allegations that donors were paid for eggs used in the research leading to the 2004 paper, that junior lab members were among the donors, and that Hwang had lied about the oocyte sources in the Science paper. Two days later, Hwang admitted in a press conference that he knew about junior members donating eggs but lied to protect their privacy. He resigned as director of the newly announced Stem Cell Hub but vowed to continue his research (Science, 2 December 2005, p. 1402).

Despite Hwang's admissions, PD Notebook producers bore the brunt of public anger over the revelations. The backlash intensified after Han and another top producer held a 2 December press conference announcing that a report questioning the authenticity of Hwang's work was yet to come. After Sun Jong Kim and another colleague in Pittsburgh, Jong Hyuk Park, told another television program that the interview with PD Notebook had been coerced, all 12 of the PD Notebook sponsors canceled their ads, and on 4 December, MBC apologized for the producers' use of unethical tactics.

Producer Kim says that 20,000 angry postings filled up MBC's online bulletin boards, and that the network received so many threatening calls that reporters had a hard time using the phones for work. On 7 December, MBC suspended PD Notebook and decided not to air the segment covering questions about the 2005 paper and the interview with Sun Jong Kim.

Given Hwang's popularity among the Korean public and the trust he enjoyed among researchers worldwide, the matter might well have ended there. But, according to an official of the Biological Research Information Center (BRIC), which provides online news on scientific trends and careers primarily for young researchers, at 5:28 a.m. on 5 December, a contributor to a BRIC Internet message board placed a cryptic post with the English header, "The show must go on …" The anonymous poster suggested that readers look for duplicated pictures among the supporting online material accompanying the 2005 Science paper. The poster ended his message with the tease: "I found two! There are rumors that there are more …"

More than 200 posts followed, identifying apparently duplicated photographs. There was also an online discussion about whether someone should inform Science. Someone did e-mail Science editors pointing out the duplicated photos. By that time, however, Hwang had already notified the journal of what he termed an accidental duplication of some of the photos. Science editors and scientists around the world were still willing to give Hwang the benefit of the doubt, believing that photos had been mixed up sometime between paper acceptance and publication online.

But the BRIC posts continued. On 6 December, another anonymous BRIC poster wrote that there appeared to be duplications in the DNA fingerprinting traces and posted evidence to support that claim the following day. At about this time, the BRIC postings were reported in the general Korean media and then picked up worldwide. On 12 December, SNU said it would launch an investigation. With public opinion starting to turn, on 15 December, MBC broadcast the PD Notebook segment showing Kim-- with his face blurred--admitting that he doctored photographs at Hwang's direction. The next day, Hwang and Schatten told Science they wanted to withdraw the 2005 paper.

Like most scientists in Korea, Hong Gil Nam, a chemist at Pohang University of Science and Technology and BRIC's first director, has mixed feelings about how the drama has played out. He's sorry to see the scandal unfold but hopeful that the postings on BRIC indicate that "young scientists have a good attitude toward research integrity."

The SNU committee is continuing its work, investigating the legitimacy of Hwang's 2004 paper in Science and the group's more recent paper in Nature claiming to have produced the first cloned dog. A host of questions remain about whether and when other people at the lab learned about the fraud. Korea's Supreme Public Prosecutors' Office says it is considering a probe of possible criminal activity, pending the outcome of the SNU investigation. The BRIC message board is as lively as ever. And MBC resumed broadcasting PD Notebook on 3 January, this time with more people from within Hwang's lab who were willing to talk about what their disgraced boss had done. Among the revelations, PD Notebook alleges that Hwang's team collected more than 1600 oocytes from egg donors--not the 427 originally reported--for cloning research for the 2004 and 2005 papers.



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[celldog]

BIOLOGY & MEDICINE

The Case for Adult Stem Cell Research
by Wolfgang Lillge, M.D.

For more articles on biology and medicine, check the subject index
The question of stem cells is currently the dominant subject in the debate over biotechnology and human genetics: Should we use embryonic stem cells or adult stem cells for future medical therapies? Embryonic stem cells are taken from a developing embryo at the blastocyst stage, destroying the embryo, a developing human life. Adult stem cells, on the other hand, are found in all tissues of the growing human being and, according to latest reports, also have the potential to transform themselves into practically all other cell types, or revert to being stem cells with greater reproductive capacity. Embryonic stem cells have not yet been used for even one therapy, while adult stem cells have already been successfully used in numerous patients, including for cardiac infarction (death of some of the heart tissue).

Stem cells are of wide interest for medicine, because they have the potential, under suitable conditions, to develop into almost all of the different types of cells. They should therefore be able to repair damaged or defective tissues (for example, destroyed insulin-producing cells in the pancreas). Many of the so-called degenerative diseases, for which there are as yet no effective therapies, could then be alleviated or healed.

It is remarkable that in the debate–often carried on with little competence–the potential of embryonic stem cells is exaggerated in a one-sided way, while important moral questions and issues of research strategy are passed over in silence. Generally, advocates of research with embryonic stem cells use as their main argument that such research will enable us to cure all of the diseases that are incurable today–cancer, AIDS, Alzheimers, multiple sclerosis, and so forth. Faced with such a prospect, it is supposed to be "acceptable" to "overlook" a few moral problems.

On closer inspection, however, the much extolled vision of the future turns out to be a case of completely empty promises: Given the elementary state of research today, it is by no means yet foreseeable, whether even one of the hoped-for treatments can be realized. Basically, such promised cures are a deliberate deception, for behind the mirage of a coming medical wonderland, promoted by interested parties, completely other research objectives will be pursued that are to be kept out of public discussion as much as possible.

Perfect candor should rule in stem cell research. This requires that the scientist himself clearly establish the moral limits of his activity and declare what the consequences of research with embryonic stem cells really are. In the process, no one can escape the fact that, should one wish to use embryonic stem cells for "therapeutic purposes," the very techniques will be developed that will also be used for the cloning of human beings, the making of human-animal hybrids, the manipulation of germ lines, and the like–thus for everything other than therapeutic purposes. Any coverup or hypocrisy in this matter will very quickly reflect upon the research as a whole.


Human Treatments
Moreover, very promising treatments of serious diseases with adult stem cells have already been tried. The special advantage is that there are no rejection reactions, because the cells are from the same body.

Of longer standing is treatment with bone marrow stem cells. The treatment comes into play when, for example, a patient has lost his or her blood-forming tissue through radiation or high-dose chemotherapy. Previously removed bone marrow stem cells are then retransplanted, and are able to resume the formation of blood cells.

In 2001, however, a team of doctors at the Duesseldorf University Clinic carried out a treatment of very far-reaching consequences. For the first time, they treated a cardiac infarct patient with stem cells from his own body. The cardiologist, Prof. Bodo Eckehard Strauer, is sure that the stem cells from the patient’s bone marrow, after injection into the infarct zone, autonomously converted to heart muscle. The functioning of the severely damaged heart clearly improved within a few weeks.

Four days after the infarction, the doctors took bone marrow from the patient’s pelvis using local anesthesia. The stem cells in the marrow were concentrated outside of the body and implanted in the infarct area the next day with a special technique via a coronary artery. However, the doctors could not yet take cardiac tissue to prove definitively that the implanted blood stem cells had converted to heart muscle cells. But, according to Strauer, there is no other way to explain the marked improvement in the patient’s condition. After this first successful operation, six more patients have already been treated with their own stem cells, with similarly positive results.

There are also reports of successful treatments with adult stem cells in cases of Crohn’s disease (a chronic infection of the gut), thalassemia (a blood disease), and a rare skin disease. And–despite the fact that basic research with adult stem cells is in its earliest beginnings and is in no way being promoted with urgency–there have been a growing number of reports lately of experiments with animals, from which it emerges that adult stem cells can successfully transform themselves into differentiated cells of organs of many kinds.

In contrast, reports of successful conversions of embryonic stem cells are very infrequent and cautious. Thus, we find in Science of Dec. 1, 2000 (Vol. 290, pp. 1672-1674): "In contrast, the human embryonic stem cells and fetal germ cells that made headlines in November 1998 because they can, in theory, develop into any cell type have so far produced relatively modest results. Only a few papers and meeting reports have emerged from the handful of labs that work with human pluripotent cells. . . . The work suggests that it will not be simple to produce the pure populations of certain cell types that would be required for safe and reliable cell therapies. . . ."

This is the restrained language used by established science to describe a truly disastrous set of results.

There are, of course, still substantial problems to be overcome, even with adult stem cells: They are relatively rare, and are hard to find with the techniques used so far. They are also not very easy to culture outside of the body. It was therefore an important advance that Australian researchers of the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research have now found a way to isolate nerve stem cells with "extreme purity" from the brains of mice. In Nature of August 16, 2001 (Vol. 412, pp. 736-739), they reported obtaining a culture of 80 percent purity, compared to a previous rate of 5 percent at best.

It is now urgently necessary to tackle the research in precisely this direction, in order to find out the exact conditions under which the differentiation of stem cells comes about and how, in detail, it proceeds. Only by this morally unassailable route will it be possible to develop new therapies for serious, heretofore incurable diseases, and beyond that, to improve our understanding of the development of life itself.


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So why the fixation on embryos when adult cells are better and no one gets hurt??

 

[Mr Sparkle]

So why the fixation on embryos when adult cells are better and no one gets hurt??

do you really think that?
if they where wouldn't the researchers use them, they are interested in what works right?
what? do you think researchers are evil or something?

 

[maxwell's demon]

anyone who does not post full articles several times a day is evil.

 

[celldog]

do you really think that?
if they where wouldn't the researchers use them, they are interested in what works right?
what? do you think researchers are evil or something?

Can you read, Sparkie?? they get better results from adult stem cells. So why not work with those instead of the very unstable embryonic ones?

 

[maxwell's demon]

to make you post more articles?