Senate passes stem cell legislation

What happened to all the "pro-life" GOP Senators?

They are getting old and sick? What's wrong with these people?

Needless to say they are no longer pro life.

Eventually this will probably pass and be signed. That is when the pro life movement suffers a crippling blow. If the perception is that aborted embryos are saving lives, few in Washington will ever be brave enough to call for the end of abortion.

Thank God for President Bush

George W. Bush stands for life.

I believe it is deeper than that. They desperately need a rationalization of why it is ok to have a law that allows babies to be killed.

Whoa! 63-37! That's disappointing, to say the least.

Yes, it is disappointing but it is short of 2/3 to over ride a veto.

Private entities can do all the embryonic research they want. Passing a law FORCING American taxpayers to pay for it, is tyrannical. Veto it President Bush.

I do not know why they keep on insisting on embryonic stem cells except they just don't like human life, period. Embryonic stem cell research is a fantasy compared to the reality of what adult stem cells are doing.

In fact, the only real medical advances from stem cells have come with adult stem-cell treatments. Hudson Institute Senior Fellow Michael Fumento asserts the advantage of adult stem cells. "Embryonic stem cell research is so far behind it's like a joke," he says. "We're getting everything we need out of nonembryonic stem cells, and what we're getting is incredible."26

Recent scientific developments prove this statement true. A few include:

* Researchers at Australia's Griffith University discovered that olfactory stem cells can be turned into almost any kind of cell.27

* Researchers at the University of South Florida Center for Aging and Brain Repair injected human-bone-marrow stem cells into rats that had suffered severe strokes. The infusion of healthy stem cells quickly brought the rats back to such a level of normal activity that it was almost as if they had not suffered the strokes. The rats displayed no motor asymmetry - a common result of strokes.28

* Researchers at Enzo Biochem Inc. have high hopes of developing a cure for HIV using adult stem cells. They inserted anti-HIV genes into human stem cells, which then developed into a type of white blood cell that blocked HIV growth.29

* Scientists at Massachusetts General Hospital have found that adult-islet stem cells can mature into pancreatic beta cells, the insulin-secreting cells that diabetes patients need.30

* Researchers at the University of Oslo are developing a treatment to heal spinal cord injuries using bone-marrow stem cells.31

* A research team at the University of Central Florida believes a person's own stem cells may hold the key to curing Alzheimer's. The team has been injecting rats with bone marrow or blood stem cells, which then proceed to replace the brain cells that are usually destroyed by Alzheimer's.32

* The National Institute for Neurological Disorders and Strokes reports that a patient's own bone-marrow can now be used to create nerve cells that could repair brain damage.33

* Johns Hopkins researchers have found that a mouse's own bone-marrow stem cells can develop into the specialized cells lining its intestines, lungs and skin.34

* Doctors at the Center for Aging and Brain Repair at the University of South Florida have found stem cells in tissue taken from the hearts of newborn babies undergoing surgery to correct congenital heart defects. It may be possible to use these stem cells to treat adults.35

* Researchers in Milan successfully treated mice with a disease similar to multiple sclerosis (MS) by injecting them with neural stem cells. The injections promoted tissue repair and clinical recovery.36

* A study published in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences shows that nerve cells can be grown from hair-follicle stem cells.37

More importantly, many of these studies have moved into human clinical trials and have yielded tremendous results in fighting many diseases, including:

Severe Combined Immunodeficiency (SCID)

* According to the National Center for Biotechnology Information estimates that new therapies involving the transplanting of bone marrow and other types of adult stem cells save up to 80 percent of SCID patients.38

Diabetes

* In Japan a diabetic woman received part of her mother's pancreas. The insulin-producing pancreatic stem cells cured her diabetes. This procedure has been successful, but it always required pancreas cells from at least three cadavers. This latest case required only about half the number of cells.39

Heart Disease

* Osiris Therapeutics, a firm developing therapies that use adult stem cells, is testing the possibility of injecting heart-attack patients with stem cells that can migrate into the heart and replace damaged cells.40

* Multiple studies around the world have shown that adult stem cells improved cardiac functioning for patients. Patients with congestive heart failure saw significant improvement when bone-marrow stem cells were injected into their cardiac tissue.41 One patient who had been bedridden with heart failure was walking three miles a day within months.42

Sickle Cell Anemia

* Doctors at the University of Pittsburgh cured 15-year-old Keone Penn of sickle cell anemia through intensive chemotherapy and injection of stem cells from umbilical-cord blood.43

Acute Myeloid Leukemia

* Treating child leukemia patients with umbilical-cord-blood stem cells has proven extremely effective. Adult Leukemia patients require a much larger quantity of stem cells, making it difficult to treat them, but researchers at the University of Minnesota are developing a therapy which combines stem cells from the blood of two umbilical cords.44

Multiple Sclerosis (MS)

* Several hundred patients worldwide have reported improved conditions after receiving adult stem-cell transplants to treat MS.45

Parkinson's disease

* An Israeli company is testing a way to treat Parkinson's using a patient's bone-marrow stem cells. The cells produce a chemical that restores a patient's motor movement.46

* Dennis Turner, who had suffered severe Parkinson's for many years, was injected with modified stem cells extracted from his brain. For the next five years his Parkinson's symptoms virtually disappeared and allowed him to live a normal life.47

* Researchers at the University of South Florida have reported that their attempts to use fetal cell grafts to combat Parkinson's were completely ineffective.48

Crohn's Disease

* After adult stem-cell treatment, several patients with severe Crohn's disease at Chicago's Northwestern Hospital have shown remarkable progress. The patients had failed to respond to standard treatments.49

Krabbe's Disease

* Umbilical cord-blood transplants significantly increased the survival rates of newborns afflicted with this rare and usually fatal disease.50

These are just some of the documented examples showing the promise of adult stem cells. Adult stem-cell treatments have successfully fought Tay-Sachs disease, sickle cell anemia, thalassemia major, non-Hodgkin's lymphoma,51 blindness,52 spinal cord injury53 and renal cell carcinoma. These treatments have also been used to fight many forms of cancer, including ovarian,54 testicular55 and breast.56

Amazing discoveries continue to show that adult stem cells carry all the proposed benefits of embryonic stem cells without the risks. Present in everyone, these cells are noncontroversial and easier to obtain. Furthermore, researchers have found adult stem cells, known as "multipotent adult progenitor cells" (MAPC's), which, like embryonic stem cells, have the capability to convert into any cell type. They have also found another cell type, the "mesenchymal stem cell" (MSC), capable of making only bone, cartilage, fat and muscle tissues, but with the remarkable ability to cause little or no immune reaction when transplanted.57 Importantly, this cell seems to go only to damaged areas.58

These two findings have incredible implications. But even more astounding is the suggestion that the cells can do something ESCR cannot do?be transplanted without fear of rejection. According to Ross Tubo of the biotech company Genzyme, "Put the properties of the two kinds of cells together and all of a sudden you have a noncontroversial, highly versatile source of adult stem cells that can, in theory, be transplanted to anyone."59 Everyday, new and ethical discoveries transform today's science into the cures of tomorrow.

LINK

TORONTO, November 20, 2003 (LifeSiteNews.com) - Dr. Peter Hollands, who holds a PhD in Stem Cell Biology from Cambridge University in the UK has spoken out on the controversy over adult and embryonic stem cells. In comments to LifeSiteNews.com, Dr. Hollands, who has worked with embryonic stem cells, noted the often overlooked fact that while adult and cord blood stem cells have been widely used for treatments, "embryonic stem cells have yet to be used to treat any form of disease."

Dr. Hollands, who worked as a clinical embryologist at Bourn Hall Clinic - the world's first IVF unit, says that "common sense" dictates that resources be directed toward adult over embryonic stem cell research. "Embryonic stem cells have many legal, moral, ethical and religious objections before even the practicalities of obtaining the cells, growing them, storing them and not least transplanting them are addressed," Dr. Hollands told LifeSiteNews.com. "Adult and umbilical cord blood stem cells are readily available, have no objections associated with them and are tried and tested in clinical use. Umbilical cord blood stem cells, for example, have been used over 3000 times for 45 different diseases!"

With numerous publications to his credit on the subject of stem cells and clinical embryology, Dr. Hollands takes issue with certain other researchers in the field who suggest that embryonic stem cells 'may work better'. A recent finding that adult stem cells can be used to repair muscle tissue, saw one of the researchers involved in the study, UBC's Dr. Fabio Rossi, said that "proposing (adult stem cells) as an alternative to embryonic cells, which may work better, is not the right thing to do." Commenting on Dr. Rossi's statement, Dr. Hollands said, "Why may they work better? We do not even know if they (embryonic stem cells) will work at all! The public must know that adult and umbilical cord blood stem cells are available, proven and ready to use for a range of diseases. We must get away from this idea of the promise of embryonic stem cells and look at the realities of adult and umbilical cord blood stem cells."

Dr. Hollands, who is currently the Scientific Director of Cells for Life, a private cord blood bank in Markham Ontario, also disagreed with those who contend there is a great need to continue study of embryonic stem cells. "We should focus our attention on the most readily available and usable type of cells and these are adult and umbilical cord stem cells. Embryonic stem cells at present are largely political rhetoric and scientific hype. Adult and umbilical cord blood stem cells are proven and ready to use. The public needs to know this," he said.

LINK

There is copious amounts of evidence that adult stem cell research IS working while embryonic stem cell research is a fantasy.

"Thank God for President Bush"

I didn't really vote for W in 2000, I voted against Al Gore. I was a senior in college and didn't really have time or access to much info on the campaign. (Although I remember his acceptance speech was very good)

Anyway it was that following summer, when he made his first decision about federal funding of embryonic stem cells that I realize what a good man he was.

I am all for federal funding of adult stem cells and umbilical cord cells, you know, the boring, successful stuff that does end life.

mean "does not end life." Geeze lack of sleep really getting to me.

Listening to Bill Frist on radio today, he was making the case that these embryos "are for sure going to be destroyed anyway."

That's tantamount to scientists doing "research" on death camp "attendees" who "are just going to be sent to the gas chambers, for sure, so they might as well be used to save human lives."

If it has such great promise the private sector should clean up. I agree with the slippery slope theme. This could lead to all kinds of crazy ideas. And until we solve social security and Medicare bankruptcy it makes no sense to keep people living long after they should be dead.

Crossing Line On Cloning.

Here is what a Harvard trained MIT stem cell biologist has to say about what the senate and scientists are selling now.

This is why a constitutional amendment reaffirming the protection of life needs to take priority over flag burning and same sex marriage amendments.

While the definition of marriage needs to be preserved, people are being butchered every day.

We face continued threats including euthenasia (which CAN be out of the hands of the victim at times) and genetic screening as grounds for discrimination.

The taxpayers of this country shouldn't be funding ANY stem cell research. If the research is as promising as everyone claims, private individuals would be lining up to get a piece of it. They're not and that should tell us something.

They have sold their souls for a fantasy. I begin to ask why? Could it simply be that their pride will not allow them to admit that they made a mistake? Could it be that their egos are so enormous that they think they can develop miracles?

I'm thinking it's a combination of the two.

Do we have a list of yea's and nea's?

"We're getting everything we need out of nonembryonic stem cells, and what we're getting is incredible."

Thank you for posting all of those developments. The pro-death crowd will ignore the facts.

Again, we are confusing Republican and Conservative.

People have to forget about Democrat and Republican. There are now three political parties. Conservative, Liberal and Republicrat or RINO.

The McCains and Grahms of the world are not Conservative. They are all the new JFK's. Strong on defense, fair with spending and liberal on social issues. If they ever get enough money to run political campaigns the way the Left does, Conservatism will be toast.

Many of us still have our heads in the sand, wondering why our Republican senators act this way. Well, it is because they are Republicans and not Conservatives. Zell Miller is a Democrat, but also a Conservative. Party affiliation no longer matters. It is ideology that matters.

We need to elect Conservatives and not Republicans.