Vote NO on this CLONE & KILL Bill-Bill to allow the cloning of human embryos for biomedical research Bill # H.R.801
* 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.
*Rather than receiving bone marrow transplants, the three boys underwent stem cell therapy. The experimental procedure worked. Two years post-surgery, their doctors at UCLA Medical Center pronounced the boys cured.
*Last year, 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.
Ever hear of bone marrow or umbilical-cord-blood transplants? It's the stem cells in the marrow and blood that makes them work. They've been used therapeutically since the 1980s and now some 70 different diseases, primarily forms of leukemia, are treated with them.
True, these comprise direct infusions rather than the next step of "reprogramming" the stem cells outside the body to make them into various types of mature cells.
But there's tremendous progress here, too. As of last year, over 30 different anti-cancer applications alone involving non-embryonic stem cell therapies on humans had been reported in peer-reviewed medical literature. Over 100 non-embryonic-stem-cell experiments in animals have shown success against a vast array of diseases.
Catherine Verfaillie and her co-workers at the University of Minnesota's Stem Cell Institute recently published a report in Science's main competitor, Nature, suggesting that a certain type of marrow stem cells may give rise to almost any type of tissue in the body. They have isolated them from the marrow of mice, rats and people and so far have transformed them into cells of blood, the gut, liver, lung, brain, and other organs.