Posted on 06/20/2005 8:01:40 AM PDT by wagglebee
The courier arrived just after midnight with a bag of blood collected from a fresh umbilical cord.
Inside the laboratory at Family Cord Blood Services in Santa Monica, a worker siphoned off red cells, leaving a dilute mixture of stem cells — a personal supply for Olivia Michelle Boyd, born 15 hours earlier in Honolulu.
Her parents, Stephanie and Anthony Boyd, had agreed to pay the company $1,265 to harvest the material and $115 a year to preserve it in a stainless steel tank filled with liquid nitrogen.
Olivia was perfectly healthy. The stem cells were, the sales pitches suggested, biological insurance against disease.
"I'm unsure about the future," Stephanie Boyd said. "I know doing this is the best step."
In the still-experimental field of stem cells, the banking of umbilical cord blood has emerged as its biggest industry, driven by marketing claims that the blood could one day have the potential to cure ailments such as Parkinson's disease, paralysis and diabetes.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
This is an absolute lie! There has yet to be any evidence that embryonic stem cells do anything, EXCEPT justify the murder of more babies. Umbilical stem cells have just as much promise, but the left downplays this promise because it means the babies live.
Stem cell ping
There is a common post-Enlightenment belief that religion and superstition are equivalent. Not true.
(In the Christian West, superstitions have tended to arise when religion breaks down. For instance, witchcraft and witch burnings ran wild at a time when contention, division, and doubt arose within a once united Christian Europe. There were more astrologers and practictioners of magic in the Renaissance than in the middle ages.)
It is as easy to be superstitious about science as it is about religion, and here is a good example. Superstition arises through ignorance, and by taking the words of charlatans and pseudo-experts on faith. Here we see a good example of it at work.
What are you trying to say?
That this fetal stem-cell business would go nowhere if not for the credulity of people when "experts" speak out. This is especially the case when the experts pretend to speak in the name of "science." Someone has sold this woman a bill of goods.
The problem is that the left will stop at nothing to downplay the potential of anything other than embryonic stem cells. And if people really stop to think about it, they would realize how little potential there is with embryonic stem cells. There is absolutely no law against private corporations doing research on and creating new stem cell lines, the federal government just isn't going to fund it. But private companies aren't investing their own money in embryonic stem cell research, and there can only be one logical reason, and that is that they don't see any promise in it, otherwise they would pour billions into it.
Cord blood produces adult stem cells not embryonic stem cells. Stem cells harvested from "cord blood" are widely used for treating cancer and other illnesses although I am not sure how successfully. There is no destruction of life in this process, only the use of stem cells that are normally discarded.
Right. Probably I should have noted that. I just think the idea of freezing cord or placental stem cells for possible use many years in the future is pretty questionable science. It's more or less on a par with freezing your body in hopes of being revived in the far future.
Yes, it's conceivably possible, but not very likely.
Larry Niven refers to these stored bodies as "corpsicles" in one of his stories.
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