2 New Efforts to Develop Stem Cell Line for Study

Scientists at two universities — Harvard and the University of California, San Francisco — will try to develop embryonic stem cells from the adult cells of patients suffering from certain diseases.

Their purposes in creating the cell lines, which require making an early human embryo, are to study how the diseases develop and also to see if replacement cells can be generated to repair the patient's own degenerating tissues. But the field, despite its much emphasized promise, faces many serious uncertainties.

"Clinical applications may be a decade or more away," said George Q. Daley, a Harvard expert on blood diseases.

Harvard announced its plans yesterday at a news conference; the University of California, San Francisco, did so less conspicuously a month ago, resuming a program abandoned in 2001. Both universities, having received required approvals, will at first obtain the human eggs needed for cloning from fertility clinics, starting with eggs deemed too low quality to produce a successful pregnancy. Both programs are privately financed because federal support for human stem cell research is available only for cell lines made before August 9, 2001.

Advanced Cell Technology in Worcester, Mass., also has a human nuclear transfer program "well under way," said Robert Lanza, the company's vice president, but has run into problems in recruiting egg donors. Under guidelines issued by the National Academy of Sciences, which are voluntary but widely observed, donors may not be paid anything beyond expenses.

The new efforts, if successful, would accomplish what the disgraced South Korean scientist Woo-Suk Hwang claimed he had achieved in articles published in Science in 2004 and 2005. Both papers turned out to be based on forged data. But the flaws remained undetected by scientists involved in the cloning field, raising doubts about the rigor and expertise with which the new...

Advanced Cell Technology in Worcester, Mass., also has a human nuclear transfer program "well under way," By avoiding the use of the true term for this --CLONING-- the community has adopted a new strategy which avoids their earlier mistake of trying to promote an outright lie --'there is a difference in cloning to get babies and cloning to get tissues from alive but not yet born babies, and we'll note that difference with reproductive cloning and therapeurtic cloning and the public will embrace our research work'. But it is still based in a fundamental effort to lie about their research and thus manipulate the public into embracing the evil, they assert without stating it directly that, 'the early embryo is not deemed a human being by us so we will exploit and dissect that early aged human as we see fit'.

What ought happen when the scientific community bases a line of research upon lies and efforts to obfuscate the truth? In this case, the scientific community undertakes a campaign of shifting the truth to fit the desired research rather than revealing more facts about their research, and that upsets me because I have a fondness for science and scientists if they're honest. It reminds me of the shift made by AGOG when its members wanted contraceptive pills to be welcomed by the public ... they changed the age-old definition of conception as fecundation creation of the embryo, to implantation of the embryo for conception. Prior to this purposeful redefining, the very work performed in IVF clinics was called conceiving embryos in vitro to help couples achieve pregnancy. With the changed definition --the new lie-- the work in IVF clinics became 'creating embryos' to help women conceive.

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