Redstate

About 7 or 8 years ago, people started talking about the potential medical advances that could come from "stem cells".

I don't know how long the medical community has known about these things but I'd never heard of them before about 2000.

Keep in mind that the pro-abortion crowd loses ground to the pro-life crowd every year as future pro-lifers are being born and would-be future pro-abortionists are all-too-often aborted. Those who survive to adulthood often choose to have 1 or 2 kids.

Pro-lifers tend to have bigger families.

At any rate, the whole stem-cell argument is designed to reverse the answer to the question: "Who's meaner: pro-lifers or pro-abortionists?" Because if life-saving and/or healing powers can come from these stem cells, then clearly pro-life people are mean for trying to stifle this technology.

By the way, to answer your question about what was discovered, I'm not sure exactly what "ethical stem cell research" is, but my belief is that it has to do with the stem cells that come from bone marrow and/or umbilical cords rather than from aborted fetuses.

My guess is that the scientists discovered that these "ethical" stem cells have the same ability to turn into other cells that the "unethical" stem cells do.

Which means that there is no reason to dump billions of taxpayers' dollars into a form of unethical research that creates an incentive for moms to abort their kids.

Romney/Thompson 2008

debate on such matters, I first always let everyone know that Science and anything related to it was always my worst subject. Econ on the other hand, well you better know what you are talking about when you challenge me there.

I do know that without some sorts of ethical limits on research we will soon have all sorts of experiments that will frankly be obscene. I don't know if stem cell research is the limit or not, however I firmly believe there should be limits.

Always tell the truth, George; it's the easiest thing to remember.

Proprietor Nation

Why didn't you just answer that you don't know much about the science or the new discovery?

Stem cells have been known since the 60's but doesn't really catch on until the early 80's when embryonic stem cells are first derived from otehr cells in mice. By the mid-90's the science had proven both the existence and the power of stem cells and the first human stem cell line was derived in '98.

It has nothing to do with pro-choice/pro-life politics - stem cells are not an invention of the pro choice crowd nor are they a threat to the pro life crowd; they are a scientific discovery furthering our understanding of our biology that may have practical applications in treating and possibly curing many diseases.

The advancement reported this week (by two different teams in two different journals) was the ability to create 'embryotic stem cells' from adult human skin cells - meaning that POTENTIALLY their would be know need to destroy human embryos to create embryotic stem cells; hopefully ending the political grandstanding aorund the issue and returning it to scientists.

Thank you lapert. If only more issues could be discussed more objectively and productively.

Next up, maybe more objective debates about global climate change without using the issue to bludgeon, tar or ridicule one side of the political spectrum or the other.

If you want to make it less "political" then don't ask to fund it. Everything the government seeks to fund ought to be subject to political grandstanding. It certainly can't be "returned to the scientists" if government is the one funding it.

Apart from the life issue, government shouldn't fund ANY scientific research. Scientists should be motivated to come up with new ideas and inventions by the prospect of actual profits, not by the knowledge that government money will come whether they do anything worthwhile or not.

Still, it's a tough call whether I would rather see funding for research or for a Sandra Day O'Connor building.

Of course I also believe the mad scientists who come up with the idea to experiment with human life need to be placed into mental institutions, but that's a separate issue.

I do think Government should fund science becuase it suffers from the sort of externalities that in a true market lead to sub-optimal equilibriums. However, I would prefer government not fund it on a case by case basis but by establishing pools of money that scientists compete for (to some extent this is how it is done, but then these single issues come around and it goes downhill). In otherwords, government can step in to help the market internalize the positive externalities of scientific production but still allow the market to find the right distribution.

i'm not a scientist, so it probably helps me to explain this in layman's terms.

there are (to my knowledge) two kinds of stem-cells scientists believe can be used or harvested to replace diseased cells in humans who are ill.

one kind is adult stem-cells that are obtained in several ways from fully-developed humans and do not require the destruction of a human embryo. the other kind is embryonic stem-cells which require a human embryo to be destroyed in order to obtain and use its stem-cells.

the controversy has always been over embryonic stem-cell research. pro-lifers oppose the research because it involves creating an embryo only to destroy it for the purposes of science.

liberals and some scientists argue that embryonic stem-cell research is more promising because the cells have the potential to grow into many different kinds of human cells. they argue that adult stem-cells do not offer this same degree of potential.

embryonic stem-cell research is curently legal, yes, LEGAL in all 50 states. democrats accuse bush and others of "banning" embryonic stem-cell research when, in fact, there is no such ban. bush has refused to fund it and liberals therefore call it a "ban." strange how they arrive at that conclusion.

the recent news is that researchers have now developed a process by which adult stem cells can be transformed into embryonic stem-cells without creating and destroying a human embryo.

adult stem-cell research has led to over 70 cures whereas embryonic research has produced zero. liberals will counter that the piss-poor results are due to the "ban" bush has put in place. clever, huh? and the MSM gives them a free pass every time.

to make a correction to what California Conservative said, the issue of embryonic stem-cell research has nothing at all to do with abortion. again, embryonic stem-cells are obtained by the creation, and subsequent destruction of a human embryo outside the womb in a laboratory.

this is perhaps one of the best developments for socons since the partial-birth abortion ban. liberals have played to voters' ignorance on this issue and won plenty of elections as a result.

check out this disgusting ad a liberal 527 ran against james walsh (they ran the exact same one against george allen too):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EBobHMq-ixI

that ultimately Bush was against the government funding stem cell research. Frankly, if it is as great as the powers that be claim, they would have no trouble raising private funds. Where is the George Soros money?

My buddy is a scientist. I like to call him that though he works in the Dept. of Cell and Molecular Biology at Northwestern. While I have no idea what he does specifically, the one thing I do get is that research is totally hit and miss. It maybe years, decades, if not generations before we can really know if stem cell research is all that or not. That is the rub. On the one hand, if it is all that we need to pour as much as we can into it. If it isn't, then all sorts of human life has been destroyed for a fruitless effort.

Always tell the truth, George; it's the easiest thing to remember.

Proprietor Nation

Pres. Bush is opposed to embryonic stem cell research. In fact, yesterday he praised the work done that lapert refers to. He, like most pro-lifers, has an issue in using human embryos for research.

"the controversy has always been over embryonic stem-cell research. pro-lifers oppose the research because it involves creating an embryo only to destroy it for the purposes of science."

I wonder why many pro-lifers focus on embryonic stem cell research yet avoid the controversy around in vitro fertilization, where many embryos are created but only a few are used, the remaining ones are cryogenically stored, although there is a time limit on them, and others are out right destroyed.

Can any pro-lifers explain the difference between destroying embryos for stem cells and destroying embroyos for IVF? Or is there just a difference in how the issues have been politicized?

as you'll see here. My guess is you'll find precious few who realize the mechanics of IVF, or they would most certainly have the same issue, as it is indeed the same problem.

As with any large group, there is a wide variety of opinion amongst pro-lifers with regard to this, as well as a significant segment who have no well-formed opinion. But I think these points might shed light on this question:

1.) Nobody, to my knowledge, is suggesting there be federal funding of in vitro fertilization, as has been the proposal with regard to embryo-destructive research. As it stands, their status is the same: legal but unfunded by the federal government.

2.) Many (but not all) pro-lifers support laws that would make in vitro fertilization as currently practiced legally problematic, at best. (I think it would be unproblematic under these proposals to create embryos via IVF one at a time, and stopping once impregnation was successful, leaving no "excess" embryos destined for destruction.) These laws, however, would not be aimed directly at IVF, but rather towards the general principle that human life at all stages of development deserves protection under the law. However, getting such laws passed in a country where it takes more than ten years of pulling teeth to get a hugely popular and mostly symbolic ban on partial birth abortions enacted seems to many pro-lifers rather foolhardy in the short term. More feasible is the goal of overturning Roe v. Wade and enacting more moderate measures after that, leaving more ambitious measures for the longer term.

3.) There has been considerable promotion of embryo adoption in some circles, which is probably the most that can be done for such embryos for the moment.

In regards to your first point, federal funding was never made availible to IVF research, so the entire process, from begining research to the end fertility services was conducted with private funds and thus did not require any federal oversight or regulation. If federal funds were given to IVF research in the beginning there would have existed the oppurtunity for oversight that could have dictated the 'one' embryo at a time process you were describing in point #2?

ESCR is going down the same path, it is not illegal so doesn't the withholding of federal funds simply push the research into unregulated processes with no federal oversight that could result in even greater future problems like the 'excess' embryoys of IVF?

I trust you're right with regard to the original research going into the development of IVF being completely private. I have no independent knowledge of that matter. I was thinking more of the prospect of IVF being covered by federally-sponsored health care plans. I don't know whether any of the various candidates' plans would cover such things, or whether other countries with socialized medicine cover IVF. But I imagine that, if this were to happen in America, many American pro-lifers would make the very same protests against the funding of IVF that they have been making against the funding of embryo-destructive research.

I'm sure that IVF is currently regulated by someone, whether federally or in the states or wherever. Few things in this world are completely unregulated, alas. However, I can't off the top of my head imagine any currently politically feasible way for governments, whether federal or state, to regulate it in such a way as to protect excess embryos from destruction, and I'm sure I'm not the only pro-lifer who is flummoxed in this way. But if such a way could be found, the funding or lack thereof would be no issue, since governments tend to be resourceful in finding reasons to regulate things—all the more so, surely, when the very legitimate state concern of protecting human life is at play.

I hope this answers your question.

(I see that some other people have already posted some answers, but different ways of explaining things might click better with different people, so I'll go ahead.)

Embryonic stem cells are valuable because they are pluripotent. Pluripotency literally means "can do many things," and in this matter it means that these cells can become almost any other kind of cell. They are basically blank disks: If you give the right information to a disk, it will become, in a way, a word processor or a game or a movie or whatever. In much the same way, if you feed an embryonic stem cell the right information (encoded in chemicals), it can become just about any other kind of cell. And cells like this might be used for all sorts of medical purposes for patients that are in need of a certain, very specific kind of cell.

There are two catches, though. The first is that, once you feed information to the embryonic stem cell "blank disks," you can't overwrite the information. (At least you haven't been able to, as we'll see below.) If you turn an embryonic stem cell into a red blood cell, it stays a red blood cell; and if you turn it into a skin cell, it stays a skin cell. Happily, before you do that, while embryonic stem cells are still embryonic stem cells, you can copy them as many times as you want. So you'll have enough to make whatever you need to make and still have enough left over for future projects.

The second catch is that, in order to get an original embryonic stem cell from which you can make all these copies, you need to destroy the embryo. In order to get the blank disk, you have to break the computer. This is where the obvious ethical concerns come in.

Fortunately, however, these ethical concerns have not been a great obstacle to a lot of important research. Firstly, there are adult stem cells. Conveniently, these can be extracted without killing the adult. Adult stem cells are called multipotent, which in Latin means the same thing as pluripotent—"can do many things"—but in English scientific usage means that they can do a lot of things, but not quite as many as pluripotent cells. Different types of adult stem cells can be turned into different categories of "regular" cells: some only into skin cells, but any kind of skin cell, others only into nerve cells, but any kind of nerve cell, etc. We might think of these as partially-written blank disks, like a mostly-blank DVD that can be encoded with any movie—but only a movie, no games or word-processing programs. (But once you write Happy Gilmore onto this disk, you're still stuck with it and can't overwrite it with The Godfather.) This sort of cell is good enough for most purposes, but not quite everything—or at least not as efficiently as one might hope.

Secondly, these ethical concerns can (largely) be avoided by the Bush policy on stem cell research, announced back when the controversy was just beginning. This allowed for federal funding of research using embryonic stem cells, but only those from lines that already existed—that is, copies (and copies of copies, and copies of copies of copies, and so on) of embryonic stem cells from embryos that had already been killed. Research on stem cells from other embryos, that hadn't been destroyed by the date of the announcement of the policy, would not be funded with federal money, though it was still legal and could be funded by the states or private sources. Again, these lines were good enough for most purposes, but since these permitted stem cell lines had ever so slightly different chemical properties and might conceivably behave slightly differently, some scientists wanted to be able to destroy new embryos in order to do research on new lines, without having to fill out all the paperwork to get non-federal funding.

Finally getting to the present research, what these scientists have now done is basically a way to format disks—to wipe all the information off of it so that it can be filled up with any other information. They have taken normal everyday skin cells and injected them with viruses that act sort of like erasers, erasing all the information in their DNA that says "don't be anything but a skin cell," and leaving intact all the DNA that can be turned into anything else. (The "don't be anything but a skin cell" information isn't erased permanently: the new cell or its descendants can still be turned back into skin cells. It's really just that a "switch" has been turned off.) These new cells are almost the exact equivalent of embryonic stem cells, except that no embryo was destroyed in the process—or even involved, except in the sense that the adult from whom the original skin cell was taken is nothing but an overgrown embryo. Federal funding for this type of research is entirely unproblematic and requires no new legislation, though things like the HOPE Act might grease some wheels.

There are still slight differences between these stem cells and embryonic stem cells, but it seems unlikely that these will be significant—not only from the fact that this is the way scientists are reported to be talking about it, but also from the fact that the same process can be used on an unlimited number of different base cells (from different people and possibly of different types), and from the fact that there are other, similar processes in the pipeline, which will use things besides the viruses that these guys used to do about the same thing, perhaps better.

This discovery has the potential to change the stem cell debate entirely, since it is now highly unlikely that there is any benefit to engaging in embryo-destructive research as opposed to the three currently fundable avenues (adult stem cells, pre-Bush stem cell lines, and the new method of creating stem cells, with other methods likely on the way). The burden of proof is now placed squarely on those who would want to destroy embryos in their research to establish that there is any identifiable scientific benefit to doing so. A great deal of credit for this must go to President Bush, since if he had not restricted funding in the first place, it's quite possible that the line of research that yielded the recent discovery would never have been pursued, or would not have been pursued with any urgency, only yielding results at a far later date.

(This is my layman's understanding of the matter, at least. I'm not 100% confident of every detail, but I hope it's of some use.)

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Develop alternatives to existing policies and keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes the politically inevitable. Milton Friedman

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Develop alternatives to existing policies and keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes the politically inevitable. Milton Friedman

It will be more time before there is enough cnfidnece that this will replace embryonic stem cells - and so researchers will still be using them for the forseeable future. The most immediate challenge will be finding a way to convert skin cells to embruonic stem cells that does not use a retrovirus that is prone to tumors.

And before we give credit to Bush or any politician it should be noted that this research has been going since before his policy was put in place and did seem to have increase in urgency following it - urgency was driven by the multiple researchers striving to be the first to succesfully pull of the trick which coincidently happened to two different teams simultaneously.

This is a good guide, and I hope to clarify a bit of Latin etymology.

"Pluri" comes from "plus," meaning "more."
"Multi" comes from "multus," meaning "many."

So, "pluripotent" is, as presented in the post, more potent than "multipotent," due to the use of a comparative term.

I'll correct this in my diary version. Thanks.

Thomson's team actually used NANOG and LIN28 rather than KLF4, and c-MYC.

Nobody, to my knowledge, is suggesting there be federal funding of in vitro fertilization, as has been the proposal with regard to embryo-destructive research.

IVF research was paid for, at least in part, by grants from the National Institute of Child Health and Development (NICHD) a branch of the NIH which is in turn part of the US Dept of Health and Human Services. The US stopped funding embryonic research including IVF in 1973. After this the major breakthroughs came outside the US. No federal funds will mean much the same for embryonic stem cell research. The major breakthroughs will come from Asia and the EU and the US will do some follow up work based on those breakthroughs.

Can anyone here explain to me why it is people think that federal funding for stem cell research will lead to more embryos being destroyed? There are currently about half a million frozen embryos in the US and most of those will end up being destroyed. I'm sure you are all aware that more than enough embryos to supply this research are currently being destroyed by IVF clinics. No excess destruction would be required. It is simply a matter of diverting embryos from medical waste to medical research. If you truly believe in the personhood of each of these embryos your energy would be much better expended fighting IVF rather than stem cell research.

As for adoption, there are simply not enough people who will adopt these embryos and even when they are adopted multiple embryos are used for each attempt and the success rate is generally about 1 in 3 so for each embryo you adopt you are destroying several to dozens of others.