Free Republic

Putting Up with Self Critics warned of bad experiments and false hope. But Denise Faustman seems to be right about a strategy to regrow insulin-making cells killed off in diabetes By Philip E. Ross Five years ago Denise Faustman stunned the biomedical world--and not in a good way, it seemed. She declared that she had cured diabetic mice by getting them to regrow their insulin-producing beta cells, a finding that, if it could be translated to humans, would spare the million-odd Americans with type 1 diabetes their daily needle pricking and insulin dosing. Since her announcement, the academic establishment has...

It’s an old trick: encourage your opponents to fight each other so they never suspect the actual threat. In the case of stem cells, conflicting worldviews are being skillfully exploited to incite mankind to “hang separately” precisely when it needs to “hang together.”  Stem cell advocates claim that millions might suffer if crucial biomedical research is delayed or blocked. This prediction is correct, but wrong in its tense. Millions have already suffered, but not because of a President’s veto, or over religion, morals, or ethics. Proven research with immediate potentials for improving the lives of millions is being ignored, maligned,...

January 20, 2005 LifeSiteNews.com - Success stories about adult stem cell treatments are coming in so fast that LifeSiteNews.com, one of the few newswire services to follow the issue closely, is having trouble keeping up. While most disease research organizations, such as Juvenile Diabetes, Multiple Sclerosis and the Canadian Cancer Society, continue to promote the use of living embryonic human beings for experimentation, the only success stories to date have all come from the use of adult stem cells. Adult stem cells are distinguished from those derived from embryos, and do not necessarily mean only those from adult patients. Adult...

The Invisible Revolution By Reason McLucus The news media are ignoring a major medical revolution. Doctors and scientists have been making major strides in the fields of tissue engineering and regenerative medicine in the last decade. Journalists write news stories about embryonic stem cells which only promise to be useful sometime in the distant future and ignore the fact that doctors have been using adult stem cells to grow bones and treat various disorders for years. Harvard University’s Dr. Joseph P. Vacanti and his brother Dr. Charles A. Vacanti have been among the leaders in this field. Joseph Vacanti began...

Miracle cells SCIENCE: Cutting-edge researchers are making unheralded breakthroughs with stem cells from umbilical cords—but have a hard time breaking through the NIH funding wall. "I think people who want embryonic stem cells just don't want [alternatives] to work" | by Lynde Langdon LAWRENCE, Kan. — At the University of Kansas, Dr. Kathy Mitchell has two small labs that resemble high-school biology classrooms, just with more expensive equipment. In the smallest one, the size of a large supply closet, she pulls up a computer screen showing fluorescent dots in a sea of translucent green. She clicks her mouse, and the...

Foundation Seeks $11 Million to Fund Promising Research in HumansDiabetes in Mice Cured Using Non-Embryonic SourcesBy Dave AndruskoEditor's note. For more information on Dr. Denise Faustman's research and the effort of the Iacocca Foundation to raise money to support it, please go to http://www.joinleenow.org. To most Americans, the enduring image of Lee Iacocca is of the charismatic head of the Chrysler Corporation during the 1980s. His role as philanthropist is much less well known.Iacocca's wife, Mary, died of complications from Type I diabetes 21 years ago. Following her death, as Iacocca has said many times, "my family and I began...