Free Republic

Policy Missouri Right to Life does not support any organization that in its statements or in practice manifests anti-life positions on abortion, infanticide, euthanasia, embryonic stem cell research, or cloning. Missouri Right to Life urges citizens to consider carefully whether to support such organizations. Explanation Anti-life positions are manifested by organizations that are not directly involved in anti-life activities. Examples include, but are by no means limited to, such organizations as the American Bar Association (ABA Policy on Legislative and National Issues: Abortion [adopted August, 1992], available at http://www.abanet.org/policy/Ch-13greenbook2009-10.pdf), the Sierra Club (“[T]he Sierra Club is a pro-choice organization that...

Finnish scientists have reported a breakthrough in the attempts to understand the development of type 1 diabetes. They discovered disturbances in lipid and amino acid metabolism in children who later progressed to type 1 diabetes, also known as juvenile diabetes. The alterations preceded the autoimmune response by months to years. The study may prompt new approaches for prediction and prevention of type 1 diabetes in pre-autoimmune phase of the disease. The results of the Finnish research team, which consists of scientists from VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland and the Universities of Turku, Oulu and Tampere, have been published on...

Seattle Times medical reporter Seattle researchers will soon begin testing a way to stave off diabetes by tripping up the immune system with the help of mouse cells. Scientists at the Pacific Northwest Research Institute (PNRI) will be part of a national effort to see if they can stop type 1 diabetes — or at least delay its progression — by derailing the immune cells that attack the body's insulin producers. The experimental therapy "has a reasonable shot at being the first building block toward a cure," said Dr. Bill Hagopian, director of PNRI's work on the therapy. In early...

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...

The slick Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation International flyer that appeared in Sunday newspapers throughout the country showed a little girl on monkey bars with her hand just inches from the next bar. "The cure is so close we can almost touch it," her accompanying mother says. Likewise, JDRF Chairwoman Mary Tyler Moore proclaimed in a recent TV commercial, "We are so close to finding a cure." So wrong. JDRF is the world's largest juvenile diabetes philanthropy, distributing over $85 million in grants last year. Yet it supports no efforts that could lead to a cure any time soon for this...

Doctors may have found a way around a major obstacle in the effort to perfect transplants of islet cells, an experimental treatment for Type 1 diabetes, a severe form that often begins in childhood. Such transplants usually succeed only if islet cells from the pancreases of two or even three donors are used - a significant drawback, given the scarcity of donor organs. But now, in a trial of eight patients at the University of Minnesota, in Minneapolis, doctors have managed successful transplants of islet cells, which are needed to produce insulin, with the pancreases of single donors. The use...