Stem Cells

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For me personally, the Bush admin's war on science & its accompanying spin ("Why shouldn't differing theories compete in a marketplace of ideas? intellectual freedom!" etc, all incredibly dishonest posturing) is as distressing as its foreign policy, since the long-term effects of it are so far-reaching. Bush's initial would-be King Solomon schtick was so depressing to me - appealing wholly to sentiment, uninterested in science (and, as it turned out, in accurately stating the number of available stem-cell lines).

Now the Senate is likely to repeal his funding limits, and he's likely to veto. The bit that interests me especially right now is this:

Still, Mr. Bush could pair his veto with support for two other bills also scheduled for Senate debate Monday and Tuesday. One would ban the implantation of an embryo in the womb of a woman or animal for research purposes.

This other bill: it's a ridiculous red herring, right? It seems like an attempt to invoke the sort of sci-fi dystopia that people lean on when they're trying to slow or stop research: like a bill outlawing Baby Mills On the Moon. The consequences to animal husbandry could be pretty dire, too, I'd think. Anybody?

― Thomas Tallis (Tommy), Sunday, 16 July 2006 14:19 (nineteen years ago)

the Bush "policy" on stem cells is a gift wedge issue for Dems (i fucking hate the cynical use of wedge issues in politics, but there you go, if you can't beat em, join em)

― timmy tannin (pompous), Sunday, 16 July 2006 14:27 (nineteen years ago)

i posted this in the other stem cell thread, but it bears repeating:

have fun with this WaPo op-ed from a fundie and one of Dubya's political appointees, versus a response from somebody who actually knows what the fuck he's talking about, which has this nice bit:

Embryos at these stage only have about a 50% survival rate anyway, with half of them failing to implant, so we create this type of life naturally all the time only for it to fall on the trash heap of stochastic biology. If god is implanting souls in all these things, limbo is full of human caviar.

― kingfish cyclopean ice cream (kingfish 2.0), Sunday, 16 July 2006 14:34 (nineteen years ago)

please to link this other stem cell thread - searching for "stem cells" on ilx is way way slow

― Thomas Tallis (Tommy), Sunday, 16 July 2006 15:16 (nineteen years ago)

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/13880166/site/newsweek/?rf=snwnewsletter

article about using stem cells as wedge issue here in missouri.

― teeny (teeny), Sunday, 16 July 2006 15:41 (nineteen years ago)

the Stem Cell Debate

― kingfish cyclopean ice cream (kingfish 2.0), Sunday, 16 July 2006 19:21 (nineteen years ago)

three years pass...

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/80beats/2010/06/18/danger-stem-cell-tourists-patient-in-thailand-dies-from-treatment/

A woman with kidney disease has died after receiving an experimental stem cell treatment at a private clinic in Thailand, and a postmortem examination of her kidneys revealed that the treatment was almost certainly responsible for her death.
...
However, the Thai clinic didn’t inject the stem cells into the patient’s blood stream, instead they injected them directly into her kidneys.
...
A team of Thai and Canadian researchers performed a postmortem analysis of the kidneys, and found no evidence at all that the treatment had benefited the woman–and they found strange lumps and legions at the sites of injection. Further investigation revealed that the masses were tangled mixtures of blood vessels and bone marrow cells.

aaaaah please legalize stem cell treatments so these gruesome dystopic real life science fiction stories don't happen anymore aaaah

― dyao, Saturday, 19 June 2010 03:08 (fifteen years ago)

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