Posted on 07/25/2004 10:03:03 PM PDT by Coleus
"She was trying to HAVE A baby ,,,"
"Using the troubled logic above male masturbation would be equivalent to genocide."
The more our culture blindly accepts killing, organ harvesting and treating other human beings as mere property, the further we slide into moral relativism, and it will be very difficult for us some day to make the argument that our own killers should respect our human dignity.
Stem Cells Not the Priority for Alzheimer's
Adult Stem Cell Research More Effective Than Embryonic Cells
Embryo Vivisection and Elusive Promises Act--California Stem Cell Research and Cures Initiative
Stem Cells Not the Priority for Alzheimer's
The Stem Cell Cover-Up By Michael Fumento
Lies About Fetal Stem Cell Research [Free Republic]
Stem cells without benefit of embryos
Michael Foment Interview [DDT, Global Warming, Fuel Cells, Stem Cells, AIDS, Biotech, AD/HD, Etc.]
SELLING LIES (Stem Cell Myths exposed by Michael Foment)
FREE Book on Stem Cells and Cloning in understandable language
Unborn Children May "Cure" Mothers' Diseases Via Fetal Stem Cells
| Alzheimer's gene therapy trial shows early promise | Drug slows advanced Alzheimer's disease |
*In 2000, Israeli scientists implanted Melissa Holley's white blood cells into her spinal cord to treat the paraplegia caused when her spinal cord was severed in an auto accident. Melissa, who is 18, has since regained control over her bladder and recovered significant motor function in her limbs - she can now move her legs and toes, although she cannot yet walk.
This is exactly the kind of therapy that embryonic-stem-cell proponents promise - years down the road. Yet Melissa's breakthrough was met with collective yawns in the press with the exception of Canada's The Globe and Mail. Non-embryonic stem cells may be as common as beach sand.
They have been successfully extracted from umbilical cord blood, placentas, fat, cadaver brains, bone marrow, and tissues of the spleen, pancreas, and other organs. Even more astounding, the scientists who cloned Dolly the sheep successfully created cow heart tissue using stem cells from cow skin. And just this week, Singapore scientists announced that they have transformed bone-marrow cells into heart muscle.
Research with these cells also has a distinct moral advantage: It doesn't require the destruction of a human embryo. You don't have to be pro-life to be more comfortable with that.
*In another Parkinson's case, a patient treated with his own brain stem cells appears to have experienced a substantial remission with no adverse side effects. Dennis Turner was expected by this time to require a wheelchair and extensive medication. Instead, he has substantially reduced his medication and rarely reports any noticeable symptoms of his Parkinson's. Human trials in this technique are due to begin soon.
*Bone marrow stem cells, blood stem cells, and immature thigh muscle cells have been used to grow new heart tissue in both animal subjects and human patients. Indeed, while it was once scientific dogma that damaged heart muscle could not regenerate, it now appears that cells taken from a patient's own body may be able to restore cardiac function. Human trials using adult stem cells have commenced in Europe and other nations. (The FDA is requiring American researchers to stick with animal studies for now to test the safety of the adult stem cell approach.)
*Harvard Medical School researchers reversed juvenile onset diabetes (type-1) in mice using "precursor cells" taken from spleens of healthy mice and injecting them into diabetic animals. The cells transformed into pancreatic islet cells. The technique will begin human trials as soon as sufficient funding is made available.
*In the United States and Canada, more than 250 human patients with type-1 diabetes were treated with pancreatic tissue (islet) transplantations taken from human cadavers. Eighty percent of those who completed the treatment protocol have achieved insulin independence for over a year. (Good results have been previously achieved with pancreas transplantation, but the new approach may be much safer than a whole organ transplant.)
*Blindness is one symptom of diabetes. Now, human umbilical cord blood stem cells have been injected into the eyes of mice and led to the growth of new human blood vessels. Researchers hope that the technique will eventually provide an efficacious treatment for diabetes-related blindness. Scientists also are experimenting with using cord blood stem cells to inhibit the growth of blood vessels in cancer, which could potentially lead to a viable treatment.
*Bone marrow stem cells have partially helped regenerate muscle tissue in mice with muscular dystrophy. Much more research is needed before final conclusions can be drawn and human studies commenced. But it now appears that adult stem cells may well provide future treatments for neuromuscular diseases.
*Severed spinal cords in rats were regenerated using gene therapy to prevent the growth of scar tissue that inhibits nerve regeneration. The rats recovered the ability to walk within weeks of receiving the treatments. The next step will be to try the technique with monkeys. If that succeeds, human trials would follow.
*In one case reported from Japan, an advanced pancreatic cancer patient injected with bone marrow stem cells experienced an 80 percent reduction in tumor size.
* In separate experiments, scientists researched the ability of embryonic and adult mouse pancreatic stem cells to regenerate the body's ability to make insulin. Both types of cells boosted insulin production in diabetic mice. The embryonic success made a big splash with prominent coverage in all major media outlets. Yet the same media organs were strangely silent about the research involving adult cells.
Stranger still, the adult-cell experiment was far more successful - it raised insulin levels much more. Indeed, those diabetic mice lived, while the mice treated with embryonic cells all died. Why did the media celebrate the less successful experiment and ignore the more successful one?
* Another barely reported story is that alternative-source stem cells are already healing human illnesses.
*In Los Angeles, the transplantation of stem cells harvested from umbilical-cord blood has saved the lives of three young boys born with defective immune systems.
“‘This [isolating stem cells from fat] could take the air right out of the debate about embryonic stem cells,’ said Dr. Mark Hedrick of UCLA, the lead author. The newly identified cells have so many different potential applications, he added, that ‘it makes it hard to argue that we should use embryonic cells.’” -- Thomas H. Maugh II, “Fat may be answer to many illnesses,” Los Angeles Times, 4/10/01
“With the newest evidence that even cells in fat are capable of being transformed into tissue through the alchemy of biotechnology, some scientists said they are beginning to conclude they’ll be able to grow with relative ease all sorts of replacement tissues without resorting to embryo or fetal cells…‘It’s highly provocative work, and they’re probably right,’ said Eric Olson, chairman of molecular biology at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas…Like many biologists, Olson believes that adult, fetal and embryonic stem cell research all merit support…it’s heartening, he said, that almost “every other week there’s another interesting finding of adult stem cells turning into neurons or blood cells or heart muscle cells. Apparently our traditional views need to be reevaluated.’” --Rick Weiss, “Human Fat May Provide Stem Cells,” The Washington Post, 4/10/01
“In a finding that could offer an entirely new way to treat heart disease within the next few years, scientists working with mice and rats have found that key cells from adult bone marrow can rebuild a damaged heart—actually creating new heart muscle and blood vessels…Until now researchers thought that stem cells from embryos offer the best hope for rebuilding damaged organs, but this latest research shows that the embryos, which are politically controversial, may not be necessary. ‘We are currently finding that these adult stem cells can function as well, perhaps even better than, embryonic stem cells,’ [Dr. Donald] Orlic [of the National Human Genome Research Institute] said.” --Robert Bazell, “Approach may repair heart damage,” NBC Nightly News, 3/30/01.
“[Dr. Donald] Orlic said fetal and embryonic stem cell researchers have not been able to show the regeneration of heart cells, even in animals. ‘This study alone gives us tremendous hope that adult stem cells can do more than what embryonic stem cells can do,’ he said.” --Kristen Philipkoski, “Adult Stem Cells Growing Strong,” Wired Magazine, 3/30/01
“Like several other recent studies, the new work with hearts suggests that stem cells retrieved from adults have unexpected and perhaps equal flexibility of their own, perhaps precluding the need for the more ethically contentious [embryonic] cells.” --Rick Weiss, “Studies Raise Hopes of Cardiac Rejuvenation,” The Washington Post, 3/31/01
“Umbilical cords discarded after birth may offer a vast new source of repair material for fixing brains damaged by strokes and other ills, free of the ethical concerns surrounding the use of fetal tissue, researchers said Sunday.” --“Umbilical cords could repair brains,” Associated Press, 2/20/01.
"PPL Therapeutics, the company that cloned Dolly the sheep, has succeeded in ‘reprogramming' a cell -- a move that could lead to the development of treatments for diseases such as diabetes, Alzheimer's and Parkinson's. The Scotland-based group will today announce that it has turned a cow's skin cell into a beating heart cell and is close to starting research on humans... The PPL announcement...will be seen as an important step towards producing stem cells without using human embryos." --"PPL follows Dolly with cell breakthrough," Financial Times, 2/23/01
“Because they have traveled further on a pathway of differentiation than an embryo’s cells have, such tissue specific [adult] stem cells are believed by many to have more limited potential than E[mbryonic] S[tem] cells or those that PPL hopes to create. Some researchers, however, are beginning to argue that these limitations would actually make tissue-specific stem cells safer than their pluripotent counterparts. University of Pennsylvania bioethicist Glenn McGee is one of the most vocal critics on this point: ‘The emerging truth in the lab is that pluripotent stem cells are hard to reign in. The potential that they would explode into a cancerous mass after a stem cell transplant might turn out to be the Pandora’s box of stem cell research.’” --Erika Jonietz, “Biotech: Could new research end the embryo debate?” Technology Review, January/February, 2001.
"I don't consider a zygote to have enough of a human nature to be deserving of any legal protections."
Great post. Thank you for taking the time to present this pertinent info.
We all need to pray for many of those who replied - they are satan driven and serve no purpose other than to bash you and your message. You are only answering His call and are an apostle in our perverted world.
God bless you and your family.
"Do you believe it was God's will that a man and wife be incapable of bearing children?"
While I do not know Brooke's history and never will, I am willing to suggest that it could be birth control or abortions earlier in her life that rendered her unable to bear children.
God works in mysterious ways.
I am appalled.
This is really part of a larger discussion which no one seems to want to have. Why the rampant infertility? In my day, we certainly did not have any trouble conceiving and bearing children. Perhaps that is because we were much younger. Indeed, we had the opposite problem, and that is why we are seeing this problem now.
Today, society is shocked if a couple marries before 30 (they're so young) and further shocked if the wife gives up her career to bear children before 38, or older. No wonder they are infertile! Our next "problem" will be how to handle a generation children orphaned at 15, when their 65 year old mothers and fathers suddenly pass away.
Why do couples wait so long to start their families? Several reasons:
1) society requires more education to launch a career
2) society is highly upwardly mobile -- unwilling to settle for anything except the finest weddings, houses, cars, furniture, etc.
3) the economy requires both members of the marriage to work full time -- indeed modern society looks down on homemakers and soccer moms as useless appendages
4) the pill and other forms of birth control (as well as popular mores and public school education) have removed the shame and embarrassment out of pre-marital sexual activity
5) the "pill" and the "patch" does not protect women from STDs, thus rendering many young couples infertile before they ever decide to have children
Anybody around here remember the old TV commercial where a voice booms over the background music, "It's not nice to fool Mother Nature..."
Modern generations have been trying to "fool" Mother Nature for the last 40 years -- and the results are definitely NOT NICE.
I won't get into the merits of this particular post, but I have to point out the illogic of this comment.
You have introduced an artificial distinction between the disposal of "extra embryos" resulting from IVF, and the disposal of "extra embryo(s)" by means of abortion. Why is the disposal "sick and wrong" in one instance, and perfectly OK in the other?
For 1 baby to be born, grow, learn to know and love god, and become saved, with 1 embyro lost in the process of IVF........or for the 1 baby to never have existed at all?
This is precisely the logic used to defend various forms of "abortion for convenience."
Thanks for PING...
Why the rampant infertility?>>
Most likely complications from abortions and STD's, both leave scar tissue and waiting too long to conceive, many couples, would rather wait until they are financially stable.
There was a medical study in the past few years which theorized long term use of hormonal birth control immunizes the body against pregnancy. Even though a woman may stop using in order to get pregnant, the body has been trained not to get pregnant.
A plausible theory IMO.
Judging by your unthinking reaction, and defensive reaction, I wonder.
Said by a person judging his heart out, without even taking the time to think. What if God judges people by your strict, self-righteous actions. Do you tell you children top never think about the consequences of their actions, just do what's easiest?
It's the same embryo in both cases! How can abortion be ''sick and wrong" in one case, but okay in the other. The exact same bthing is being done.
You are en engineer and yet you know nothing about science? I hope you aren't at Lockheed.
There is a difference between and egg, and an embryo that is the result of an egg fertilized by an sperm. Apparently many people on this thread are confused. An egg will never become a baby, unless it is fertilized and an egg is no longer an egg after fertilization, and can never become one again.
If science can't be debated in the public square, that is sad. I don't know what being an atheist has to do with not acknowledging science.
So you believe it is right to kidnap someone and steal their organs, if you need a transplant?
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.