stem cell ping
The “adults” are taking over? ;)
How much longer will we waste resources on hES?
Just from a purely scientific point of view, it has never made much sense to go after embryonic stem cells, which are almost completely unprogrammed. We still don’t have a good understanding of how an embryo develops, and certainly, our understanding is insufficient to take unprogrammed cells and induce them to become cells of a type of our choosing.
It is far more sensible to take cells that already have latent programming and tweak them to complete their differentiation in a manner that they are already poised for. Of course, we’ve been doing that for years, starting long before this latest attempt to legitimize abortion as a medical necessity.
The government is really lousy at science, engineering and business.
The Human Embryonic Stem Cell industry was created as a political initiative to support abortion rights. It never had much promise as a field of medical research, but it allowed abortion rights supporters to shift the debate from Partial Birth Abortion (where they were getting their asses kicked) to the opposite end of the gestational spectrum. By holding out the false promise of breakthrough therapies, they got many people to support applying a utilitarian argument to the value of human life. This was a major step “forward” for abortion rights advocates.
Of course, California bought this argument hook line and sinker, and passed a public resolution to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on a wasteful political gesture. Outfits like Geron were just picking up the money California was throwing on the ground.
Now Geron is walking away, laughing all the way to the bank. I am not upset that the citizens of California were fleeced of hundreds of millions of dollars. They do that to themselves. It is unfortunate, however, that eight people were injected with ineffective therapies that will probably cause cancers down the road. That is a high price to pay for political gestures.
I have nothing to do with stem cells! Should I sue? Just because we share a name..... *shakes fist*