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Embryonic stem cells from adult cells? Page ten in your newspaper—MAYBE!

We know how much liberals love scientists when there’s a story touting their “man-made global warming” theories.  For a liberal newspaper editor, it’s a page one no-brainer and a happy day.  But today, the story is about scientists who have figured out a way to create embryonic stem cells from adult skin or blood cells.  That’s why it’s on page ten of the paper this morning instead of page one.  And the state-run CBC isn’t even on it at all. 

Clearly, if scientists had finally found a useful cure or treatment for any human disease using their yummy embryonic stem cells —to catch up with the large number of cures and treatments already discovered and being used as a result of adult stem cell research— then the story would cover pages one through eight.

Genetic trick turns skin cells into stem cells

Breakthrough a major advance in regenerative medicine and does not require destruction of embryos

Margaret Munro, CanWest News Service
Published: Thursday, June 07, 2007

With a few strokes of genetic trickery, scientists have transformed mouse skin cells into embryonic stem cells and proved their potency by using the new cells to produce baby mice.

The experiments are seen as a major advance for regenerative medicine, which aims to custom-build tissues and cells to repair ailing and aging bodies.

Scientists caution there are serious safety issues that must be resolved before the techniques could ever be used on people, but they say the advance points to a new way of making embryonic stem cells for patients from their own cells.

There is no need to destroy embryos, and might allow researchers to sidestep many of the ethical objections now dogging stem-cell research.

Three different teams, one in Japan and two in the U.S., reported Wednesday in the journals Nature and Cell Stem Cell they have reprogrammed skin cells to an embryonic state.

Neither eggs nor embryos are necessary,” says Shinya Yamanka of Kyoto University, who pioneered the technique that’s been replicated by the U.S. teams. All three groups individually used the cells to generate live mice.

The feat has the stem-cell world buzzing.

“It’s pretty phenomenal,” Michael Rudnicki, scientific director of Canada’s Stem Cell Network and director of molecular medicine at the Ottawa Health Research Institute, said in an interview.

[…]

I think liberals will balk at this news because they like the idea of harvesting embryos for embryonic stem cell research.  To their way of thinking, it helps justify abortion and it lessens the value of embryonic life—and life in general.  These are liberal values. 

As intelligent people know, liberals—particularly in the liberal media—have worked very hard to confuse people about stem cells, usually deploying a trick whereby they don’t differentiate between embryonic stem cell research which relies on killing embryos, which they’d like to harvest for this purpose, and adult stem cell research which doesn’t.  Even when another of the almost weekly new treatments or cures using adult stem cell treatments are discovered (joining treatments for Parkinson’s, multiple sclerosis, diabetes, immune deficiencies, spinal cord injury…), they refer to embryonic stem cells in their news stories just to confuse people.  They know embryonic stem cell research is fraught with bad ethical implications that they don’t personally care about; and adult stem cell research isn’t. 

They pretend that President George Bush has banned embryonic stem cell research which is an outright lie.  They refuse to acknowledge that massive amounts of private capital has been invested in the clearly promising adult stem cell research while there is a paucity of dollars invested in the comparatively unpromising embryonic stem cell research; which is why they constantly demand state-funding of embryonic stem cell research and why liberals like Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty strongly supports state-funding of companies willing to research embryonic stem cells.  Liberals constantly blast their plaintive wails against every bit of corporate welfare—except this one;  just as they wail against private medical clinics—except abortion clinics. 

Being intellectually dishonest is manifestly a game liberals play.  With life.

Joel Johannesen
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