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Want to fight alzheimers? Support stem cell research.
Support adult stem cell research. That's where the results have been.
Given the controversy around embryonic stem cell research it would be less fraught if adult stem cells offered the same potential as embryonic stem cells. Embryonic stem cells are thought to have much greater developmental potential than adult stem cells. It is the ability of the embryonic cell, in theory, to become all types of tissue that offers such hope of cure for many diseases.
why don't we just support stem cell research and start with the least offensive source and work our way up? Maybe we'll hit paydirt without having to stunt progress while pissing people off..
how do you know they won't work as well unless we try?
Where is the progress while debating and arguing about stem cells for three years into a political standstill?
What about menstrual blood? It seems that sources for viable stem cells have been popping out of the woodwork lately. Indeed, That's about as pliable as it gets AND unlimited in resource, eh?
Please don't get wrapped up in the rhetoric and make stem cells another abortion issue. You will be crippling progress towards a common goal. Yes, there is plenty of reason to consider the opinions of those who don't believe the way we do about reproductive cells. I'd rather not have to wait 30 years until this gets raked through he coals of the supreme court to actually get somewhere.
Can you guarentee results on embryonic stem cells? If not, then siding with caution when a significant portion of our population gets rightfully uneasy, is reason to start low and work our way up to more divisive options.
Significant portion? Or powerful portion? And what if it were AIPAC campaigning against it? Would you still say, "[side] with caution".
It isn't another "abortion issue" except that's what the radical right has made it because they insert the same dogma into the science that they do into "creationism" and things like the Terri Schiavo matter.
We're not going to agree on this, which is ok.
As for menstrul blood. Honestly? I've never heard of that as an option. And, frankly, the issue of collection seems a little er... odd.
But not where the REAL results WILL be....
http://alzheimers.about.com/od/research/f/stemcells_which.htm
Goodbye to Dolly? [Yuval Levin]
The Telegraph reports that Ian Wilmutcreator of Dolly the sheep, the first cloned mammalis giving up on his efforts to use cloning techniques in humans, to produce cloned embryos that could then be destroyed for their stem cells. Wilmuts reason, the paper reports, is the potential of so-called somatic cell reprogramming, a technique to transform a regular adult cell into the equivalent of an embryonic stem cell but without the need for embryos. Wilmut says the new approach is not only easier to accept socially but also scientifically more efficient and, he says, 100 times more interesting and capable of producing the same result.
The idea of cell reprogramming has been around a few years now. The Presidents Council on Bioethics discussed it in 2005, and President Bush pointed to it in 2006 as an example of a potential scientific solution to the ethical quandaries of embryo destruction and cloning. But until now, most stem cell researchers and most political advocates of embryonic stem cell research have insisted that this alternative technique wasnt a substitute for cloning or embryo destruction, and wasnt far enough along to make a difference to them.
Wilmut hasnt lost his mind. What has changed is the science. His reversal appears to be the first tremor in what is looking to be a massive and swiftly approaching quake in stem cell science and in the stem cell debate. Rumors have been circulating for weeks that researchers have for the first time found real success with somatic cell reprogramming in humans, and that a couple of different teams (including some of the biggest names in embryonic stem cell research) will publish several different methods that have workedproducing the genuine equivalent of human embryonic stem cells, genetically matched to cell donors, and shown capable of being differentiated into the various cells of the body, without the need to use or harm embryos.
If its trueand the evidence is mounting that these publications are coming very soon, perhaps in the next few weeksit will transform the field, and could mark a beginning of the end for the political debate over stem cells and cloning. It would also bring sweet validation for President Bushs much-maligned approach to this subject: insisting that creative science could find a way around the ethical problems, and so encouraging the exploration of ethical alternatives, not the funding of embryo destruction.
If its true.
Want to fight alzheimers? Support stem cell research.
Because people are dying while they're futzing around with things that won't work as well.
If they find it offensive, I respect that. But then they should opt not to benefit from any treatment resulting from stem cells. In the meantime, we're falling behind much of the world. Me? If a loved one or I have an illness, I want every possible effort made to cure or treat the problem.
People are dying while they're futzing around with embryonic stem cell research.
People die. That's the way it is.
Unless of course it's someone near and dear....
And...are you allowed to say "futzing around" with a Texas accent?
