Fortunately, there are still people who, unlike President Obama, don't think it is completely irrelevant to ask ethical questions about science. Even better, they have the science itself right. Here is Father Raymond de Souza on Obama's official proclamation that, henceforth, we should give science a pass on ethical questions:
Read the rest here.Remember the heady days of 2004, when John Edwards promised that if John Kerry were elected president, Christopher Reeve would walk again? President Obama was less messianic on Monday, acknowledging the hundreds of millions of dollars he would shovel at ESCR may not bear fruit: "I cannot guarantee that we will find the treatments and cures we seek. No president can promise that."
No indeed. There is a reason Obama didn't guarantee results. More to the point, there is a reason why private funding for ESCR is lacking. To date, ESCR has not produced any successful human therapies. Not one. Cures from embryodestructive research are not around the corner. They are not even in sight.
So what about all those stem cell wonders regularly reported? There have been hundreds of them, and all of them have come from adult stem cells -- stem cells taken not by destroying embryos, but from other sources, such as bone marrow or umbilical cords. There is no ethical problem. There are actual cures. That's the science.
1 comment:
Actually, there has only been one successful stem cell therapy, and it is a transplantation of blood stem cells, not a transformation. Any therapy involving growing new types of cells is years away, adn no one knows which typesof cells we will be able to produce, or from which source.
http://scienceblogs.com/denialism/2009/03/adult_stem_cell_lies_-_everyth.php
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