8mm
Posted on 06/22/2008 11:18:04 AM PDT by wagglebee
LifeNews.com Note: William Beckman is the executive director of the Illinois Right to Life Committee. Opinion articles like this one do not necessarily reflect the views of LifeNews.com.
The June 19, 2008 headline reads “US doctors kill skin cancer with cloned T-cells.” Does this suggest that human cloning of embryonic stem cells has been successful in treating skin cancer? Absolutely not!
The details of the New England Journal of Medicine
report that generated this news coverage reveal that adult stem cells obtained from the patient were used.
As reported in ScienceDaily, researchers “removed CD4+ T cells, a type of white blood cell, from a 52-year-old man whose Stage 4 melanoma had spread to a groin lymph node and to a lung. T cells specific to targeting the melanoma were then expanded vastly in the laboratory using modifications to existing methods.”
The exciting result was an apparent cure of melanoma for this patient. “Two months later, PET and CT scans revealed no tumors. The patient remained disease free two years later, when he was last checked.”
Can other melanoma patients expect to receive this treatment soon? The reality check came from researcher Cassian Yee, M.D.
“Yee cautioned that these results represent only one patient with a specific type of immune system whose tumor cells expressed a specific antigen. More studies are needed to confirm the effectiveness of the experimental T-cell therapy.”
The widely reported introduction for this news story was: “US doctors have for the first time successfully treated a skin cancer patient with cells cloned from his own immune system.” The story included a later reference stating that the treatment “used his own cloned infection-fighting T-cells.”
How many people will immediately think of cloned human beings? That has become a common reference point in the debate over stem cell research since cloning of embryos to obtain stem cells is considered a necessary step by advocates of embryonic stem cell research.
Technically, use of “cloned” in the news report about treating melanoma is accurate. A definition of cloning states, “Cloning is the process of making an identical copy of something. In biology, it collectively refers to processes used to create copies of DNA fragments.”
However, since reporting of this stem cell research success never used the phrase “adult stem cells” -- even though the original cells were taken directly from the patient -- confusion is very likely to occur for many readers, whether that confusion was intended or not.
This news represents an exciting medical breakthrough that will become even more exciting if it can be duplicated by additional studies. This breakthrough was achieved using adult stem cells that were isolated based on specific characteristics and encouraged to duplicate themselves so large numbers of these stem cells could be infused into the patient.
This result again demonstrates that killing embryos (cloned or otherwise) for stem cells is not required to achieve medical breakthroughs.
And the media will bury these facts.
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The Old Media is on a death watch now.
Non-issue. The scientific manuscripts use accurate terminology. Stem cell is a generic term used by the MSM or the guy on the street.
BUMP
However, the term stem cell is what politicians use and public opinion counts for a lot.
These are not even “stem cells” CD4+ cells are mature T cells that can divide and are specific to the surface of the tumor.
You honestly can’t expect scientists to write using non-technical, non-scientific, and non-specific terminology. The author of the article needs to find something legitimate to write about instead of making up nonsense like this.
Non-issue? Non-sense!
The MSM would always distinguish the difference between embryonic and adult stem cells when it would relay the now-disproven conventional wisdom that cells from embryos were more flexible and had greater short-term potential for medical breakthroughs. It did so throughout the 2006 midterm election campaigns in which Michael J. Fox cut TV ads for Democrats that fought specifically for Federal funding of embryonic cell research. Now that breakthroughs using adult cells are now acknowledged, it doesn't seem to want to go into detail.
Just in case you don't know, the reason for the bias is simple; editors and publishers, in most cases, are liberal and thus, "pro-choice," and they don't want to give even tacit endorsement to the idea that embryos should be treated as having rights reserved for people who made it out of their mothers' wombs alive.
President Bush's heaviest dilemma before 9/11 resulting in his decision to ban funding for further embryonic cell experiments beyond those cells that were already created for research. He ran in 2000 on being "A uniter, not a divider," but when he made a Solomonesque decision (ironically saving the baby rather than proposing splitting it), the Dems decided they didn't want to be united.
“resulting” should be “resulted.”
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