Free Republic

Without so much as a press release, Embryonic Stem Cell research is being slowly defunded by the State of California. Remember Proposition 71, the California initiative that pledged $3 billion dollars of public funds to this dubious research? Back in 2004 voters in that state bet that embryonic stem cells held the key to untold cures and therapies. Six years later, after destroying innumerable embryos and devaluing human life, they have nothing to show for their investment. Only adult stem cell research has shown any promise. By reprogramming adult stem cells, researchers have produced astounding results; curing everything from type...

If there were no controversy over human embryonic stem cells, Dr. Rudolf Jaenisch of M.I.T. and Dr. George Daley of Harvard Medical School would probably never have started some unusual, and difficult, experiments. Stem cells, a type of universal cell in early embryos, can in theory grow into any of the body's tissues and organs. But embryonic stem cells are drawn from human embryos after they have grown for about five days in the lab, and obtaining those cells requires that the embryos be destroyed. The moral objection has been that that is destroying human life. So while most stem...

The Invisible Revolution By Reason McLucus The news media are ignoring a major medical revolution. Doctors and scientists have been making major strides in the fields of tissue engineering and regenerative medicine in the last decade. Journalists write news stories about embryonic stem cells which only promise to be useful sometime in the distant future and ignore the fact that doctors have been using adult stem cells to grow bones and treat various disorders for years. Harvard University’s Dr. Joseph P. Vacanti and his brother Dr. Charles A. Vacanti have been among the leaders in this field. Joseph Vacanti began...

Johns Hopkins scientists have discovered that primitive human embryonic stem (ES) cells, temperamental in the lab, can be grown with the help of special cells from bone marrow, offering an easily obtained and well-studied source of human cells to nurture the human ES cells as they divide. First announced in 1998, human embryonic stem cells are usually grown in the lab on a "feeder layer" of mouse cells. Feeder cells send as yet unknown signals to the primitive human ES cells, preventing them from turning into more "grown-up" cell types, such as bone, fat, or brain cells. The Johns Hopkins...

Second Aborted Foetal Tissue Study Shows 'Treatment' Causes Patients Severe DamageNEW YORK, December 3, 2002 (LifeSiteNews.com) - In what is being described as the death knell for the use of aborted baby tissue in Parkinson's treatment, a second study has had catastrophic results debilitating permanently many of the human subjects involved. A recent study conducted by Warren Olanow, a neuroscientist at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York found that of the 23 Parkinson's patients who received transplants of aborted foetal tissue, 13 developed severe uncontrollable movements. While the results of the study are only to be published in...