IT'S ABOUT KILLING, NOT CURING:

Embryonic stem cell research as an obsession (Donald R. May, February 14, 2005, Townhall)

President Bush was correct to address the embryonic stem cell controversy and to provide money to fund it with appropriate limitations and safeguards. His courage to address problems quickly and definitively, and not defer them to future administrations, may well be his greatest legacy.

Bone marrow stem cell transplants save the lives of thousands each year and have been performed for more than four decades. The medical therapies developed from stem cell research (SCR) have produced successful results far beyond our expectations.

With all this scientific success and with more than 15,000 patients benefiting from SCR each year, why are some people apoplectic? The answer is both simple and perplexing. The scientific breakthroughs and the medical therapies have all come from adult stem cells and none as yet have come from embryonic stem cells. Rather than welcoming the results and pursuing support for what works, there are paradoxically increasing demands for the recognition and funding of embryonic SCR.

A dangerous combination of political and social ideology is determined to make embryonic SCR succeed. The problem is an apparent obsession with destroying human life to provide medical therapies. Looking from the outside, one might imagine that embryonic SCR supporters are advocating a pagan ritual of human sacrifice to treat disease?

It appears there is also a need to prove President Bush wrong. Do they believe that if embryonic SCR were to produce useful results, President Bush and his supporters would somehow be discredited?

Embryonic SCR supporters have resorted to political action to force its funding. As it has not been successful, and private funding is drying up, public subsidies from the National Institutes of Health and other government sources appear to be the only way to keep embryonic SCR viable. [...]

Politics, science, religion, morals, and ethics all meet head on in embryonic SCR. Adult stem cell research has shown significant success. As it is not politically correct research, it does not receive the credit and the funding that it deserves. As a result, future productive research will be slowed, and people will suffer and die from diseases that might have otherwise been treated earlier. The positive results from adult SCR are minimized and even disparaged. We have seen little news of the South Korean woman who was paraplegic for 20 years and is now starting to walk, or the leukemia patients who have survived, after adult stem cell therapy.

The supporters of embryonic SCR are apparently not as concerned about meaningful scientific results as they are about political and ideological success. They do not give the impression of being interested in curing illness or saving lives unless it is the result of embryonic stem cell therapy. Ignoring research that is working and supporting research that is not working plays into the hands of those who oppose scientific thought and factual evidence.

It's hardly surprising that the segment of the polity that is most hostile to human reproduction and population growth wants to destroy embryos and fetuses.

Posted by Orrin Judd at February 14, 2005 7:16 AM