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Stem Cell Research
Source: http://www.paprolife.org/comstemcell.html "Scientists should be the last people to take the purely sentimental view that life begins when the human being is developed enough to "look like a baby" to the naked eye. They should be the ones telling everybody else about the wonders of the intricacies of human life from the point of conception. These biological miracles of just-begun life should not be marked for experimentation and destruction. And at the very least, we taxpayers should be protected from paying for it. "The justifications being put forth for killing these young human beings are myths and misconceptions. These embryos should be allowed to live." It has happened before, and it'll happen again. Scientific researchers, presented with a new bio-technology that allows them to do amazing things, get so enamored with the fact that they can do those things that they back-burner the issue of whether they should. That's happening in the debate over embryonic stem cell research. The Harrisburg Patriot-News, in a July 2001 editorial, suggested that the moral issues should not weigh as heavily in the President's decision-making on the issue as doing what is "scientifically correct." But when issues of life and death, personhood and rights, and the powerful exercising deadly strength over the powerless are on the line, the researchers' claims deserve scrutiny. Moral issues as weighty as these are worthy of our close consideration. Many misconceptions are being put forward about embryonic stem cell research in an attempt to defend it. These misconceptions are a necessary tactic for the research's proponents, because, at heart, the American people are a moral people, and if the moral questions surrounding this research are examined, the people will withdraw their support. The first, and perhaps worst misconception is that the human embryos
being destroyed by this research are "excess embryos" who
would be destroyed or discarded anyway, so we might as well benefit from
them even if they don't benefit from us. What's worse is that some scientists in Virginia just published a report in the journal Fertility and Sterility that they are now actually making the human embryos for the sole purpose of destruction and experimentation. This is happening even without taxpayer funding. If that funding begins, it will likely lead to an increase in the practice. People are quick to shrink away from the assertion that such a practice of depersonalizing helpless human beings, using them for experiments, and killing them is Hitler-esque; but the similarities between this kind of research and that done by the Nazis last century are at least as plentiful as the differences between them. Douglas Johnson of National Right to Life was right to call these research methods "ghoulish." Misconception two is that embryonic stem cell research is an almost sure cure for many terrible diseases. The same researchers giving America that impression said so about experiments that involved implanting fetal brain tissue into the brains of adults with Parkinson's disease some time ago. It was with far less fanfare that the results were announced after the experimentation was done. The Guardian reported that these transplant patients "began to writhe, jerk their heads uncontrollably and throw their arms about involuntarily." Dr. Paul Greene, a neurologist from Columbia University, told the New York Times the end results were "absolutely devastating." "(The patients) chew constantly," Dr. Greene said, "their fingers go up and down, their wrists flex and distend. It was tragic, catastrophic. And we can't selectively turn it off." Misconception three is that there is no reliable source of stem cells that can be obtained for these experiments without the ethical questions involved in embryonic stem cell research. The truth is that stem cells have been obtained, and used successfully, from morally sound sources. In April, a group of scientists reported that they have grown tissues as diverse as human muscle, bone and cartilage, and fat cells from stem cells taken from fat in liposuction operations. Stem cells can also be taken from adult donors in bone marrow, and from umbilical cord blood and placental tissue after live births. These methods hold forth as much promise as other stem cell research, and no one is harmed. Scientists should be the last people to take the purely sentimental view that life begins when the human being is developed enough to "look like a baby" to the naked eye. They should be the ones telling everybody else about the wonders of the intricacies of human life from the point of conception. These biological miracles of just-begun life should not be marked for experimentation and destruction. And at the very least, we taxpayers should be protected from paying for it. The justifications being put forth for killing these young human beings are myths and misconceptions. These embryos should be allowed to live. David Bunnell, Education Director Adult Stem Cells Hold Hope for
Autoimmune Patients Chicago, IL -- Adult stem cells extracted from the blood of two Crohn's patients have been used to rebuild their faulty immune systems, the latest success with a technique that is being tested at several U.S. hospitals. While the debate over the use and funding of embryonic stem cells continues, doctors are already using adult stem cells to counteract autoimmune diseases such as Crohn's, multiple sclerosis and lupus. Doctors at Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago said Thursday that a 22-year-old female Crohn's patient, whose white blood cells were attacking her digestive system, was doing "phenomenally well" 2-1/2 months after the undergoing the procedure. Doctors were so pleased with her progress that they performed the procedure on a second Crohn's patient, a 16-year-old boy, earlier this week. Crohn's disease, a chronic inflammatory disease that can affect any part of the gastrointestinal tract, afflicts some 50,000 Americans and is most common in adolescents and young adults. For treating patients, using a person's own stem cells may be preferable to using embryonic stem cells since there is no risk of the body rejecting its own cells. The experimental technique has been used by doctors on people with autoimmune diseases, in which the immune system inexplicably attacks the body's own tissues. Immunologist Richard Burt of Northwestern, who performed the procedure on the Crohn's patients, said early results in both of them were very encouraging. "This is a patient who had bloody, watery diarrhea about 10 times a day for nine years, with a lot of abdominal pain. Since the procedure, she has had no diarrhea, is eating and is in no pain," Burt said of the first patient. "But we have to be very careful. This is experimental, one patient never means anything. We can't say we've cured anybody. Only time will tell. But this is obviously the best thing we could have wished for," he added. Multiple sclerosis patients who underwent a similar procedure at another hospital to rebuild their immune systems with their own stem cells showed progress, Burt said. Though the therapy did not repair existing damage to their nervous systems, it halted the development of new lesions, he said. However, stem cell therapy on lupus patients elsewhere did repair the damage to their organs, Burt said. Robert Craig, a gastroenterologist at Northwestern working with Burt on Crohn's disease, said it took him three years to find suitable patients for this experimental therapy. "They need to be very sick. They have to have failed on other therapies. There aren't that many people who are ill enough to warrant this type of therapy because the therapy itself is life threatening," he said. The process is risky because it involves destroying the patient's defective immune system with chemotherapy and a protein that drives down the number of infection-fighting white blood cells. A growth factor is introduced to stimulate the bone marrow to produce stem cells, which are then harvested from the bloodstream. Finally, the stem cells are injected into a central vein, either in the neck or arm. The whole process, including recovery, takes three weeks. "It scares me," Craig said. "I sweat bullets with these patients. When their white blood count is that low they're very susceptible to infection." Burt, the chief of Northwestern Hospital's division of Immune Therapy and Autoimmune Diseases, began studying the process of regenerating the immune systems of animal test subjects more than a decade ago. For instance, scientists have manipulated blood stem cells from adult mice to grow into tissue and that bone marrow stem cells can be made to regenerate heart muscle. Whether the process will work on human beings is not known, he said. "Can we use blood stem cells for tissue genesis to repair organs? If we can get a person's adult stem cells to do that from their blood then this whole problem of embryonic stem cells in terms of the ethical problem is not an issue," he said. "If you're able to use your own stem cells, then this debate about embryonic stem cells in not only moot, it's economically much better to use your own because you don't have to have the extensive bank and ... trying to see if you have a match, and all the quality control of preserving the tissue. It's not just ethically moot, it's practically moot." Stem Cells Heal Hearts Maggie Gallagher, September 2003
This week, medical researchers announced another stem cell
breakthrough: Stem cells injected into the heart "cured"
four out of five seriously sick heart patients waiting for transplant
surgery. Blood flow improved to the point that they were taken off the
transplant wait list, announced Hans Fernando Rocha Dohmann, who
headed up the research team, according to Reuters.
"This is the first approach where you have an opportunity to actually heal a heart," notes Dr. Michael Rosen of Columbia University (who specializes in pacemaker research). "It's going to be a very long road, but it is the most exciting thing I've seen in my 40 years as a doctor in this field." It is just one sign of the medical breakthroughs possible with stem cells, human cells that have not yet fully committed to being any one type of organ, and so may be capable of regenerating all kinds of body tissue. Notably, the kind of stem cells used in this breakthrough medical research did not come from embryos, but from the patient's own body. Doctors took cells from patients' own bone marrow and injected them into the heart's left ventricle, the main pumping chamber. There, for reasons scientists do not yet fully understand, the stem cells helped regenerate heart functions, either by forming new, undamaged muscle and blood vessels, or by stimulating some biochemical reaction the improved the functions of cells near the injection. Dohmann announced the findings at the annual meeting of the European Society of Cardiology in Vienna. Reuters calls the whole area of stem cell research "highly controversial because the most promising of such cells are taken from embryos. ... Embryonic stem cells are capable of turning into nearly 200 different types." But as Scott Gottlieb pointed out in the American Spectator, venture capitalists are betting, as this research suggests, that the most promising stem cell research is actually being done with non-embryonic (or adult) stem cells. Embryonic stem cells are too flexible, too difficult to control. They can and do turn into multiple kinds of cells under laboratory conditions. You don't want to insert cells into the heart and find they have become fingernails, for example. That kind of stuff seems to happen with embryonic stem cells on a regular basis. In the long run, scientists may discover mechanisms to control embryonic cells' wild and unpredictable growth, but in the near and medium term, the smart money is flowing into adult stem cell treatments. Among other things, you can harvest them from the patients themselves, which means the body won't attack the cells as foreign invaders. Why isn't the smart government money flowing in this direction as well? We need a national initiative to unlock the potential of stem cell research for diseases ranging from heart disease and diabetes to Alzheimer's and Parkinson's -- expensive, chronic, degenerative diseases that snatch years of productive life before they finally kill too many, too young. Some things I am not willing to do to cure my own illness or those of loved ones. I am not willing to see human beings created on purpose in order to be consumed. I don't want government pouring money into medical research that I, and millions of other Americans who share my uneasiness, cannot benefit from, especially when there is this obvious, powerful alternative. Let's shut the door on cloning and embryo consumption. Let's open wide the door to alternative solutions. Because adult stem cells work. Because they are consistent with our highest traditions of respect for human life, because it is more fair and sensible for taxpayer dollars to fund treatments that can benefit all taxpayers. Because doing things the right way always pays off in the end. Let's get going. (Readers may reach Maggie Gallagher at maggiecontact@Yahoo.com.) Currently an affiliate scholar at the Institute for American Values, Gallagher has worked as article editor of National Review, senior editor of the Manhattan Institute's City Journal, and as a senior fellow at the Center for Social Thought.COPYRIGHT 2003 MAGGIE GALLAGHER
To read other success stories using non-embryonic sources of stem cells, click here. |
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