Nov 22 2007

More Media Ignorance On Stem Cells

Published by at 11:03 am under All General Discussions,Stem Cell Debate

The proponents of embryonic stem cell research continue to deny their mistakes in light of the new process of turning skin cells into stem cells. And they continue to try and rationalize why they were not that wrong, and in the process exposing their gaping ignorance of the basic science of biology that is at the core of the moral debate. Ignorant views that equate a human individual at the embryonic stage of life with bunch of cells (or tissue) are in no position to claim a seat at the table of a serious debate such as this one. If you cannot understand the scientific differences between cells, tissue, organs and limbs (which are all components of an organism) and a living organism then you simply are not educated enough to even grunt in this debate.

The LA Times comes out and provides another example of ignorance (pretend or actual) in a debate that simply enforces the point many proponents of ESCR were too ignorant to know what they were talking about. Let’s let the LA Times give today’s example:

In general, Republicans have equated medical research using single-celled clonal embryos with murder, while Democrats have promoted state ballot initiatives enshrining human embryo cloning as a constitutional right.

Emphasis mine. This guy has a nice fancy title, but one has to wonder when he confuses a mult-cell organism (the embryo) with a stem cell. Single cells are not embryos. And clearly they cannot be harvested for stem cells (plural). The closest thing he can be talking about is basically what is happening in the skin cell breakthrough, but I think not.

Let’s be clear, the moral opposition to ESCR was the killing of embryos for their stem cells (spare parts). Arguments from proponents included all sorts of lame rationalizations, such as how young human beings were actually something else other than human. And they made this claim in the face of the body of scientific evidence to the contrary and without any proof or determination of what a young human is if it is not a young human. The proponents also made claims the embryos frozen in fertility clinics were just unwanted children we could harvest for spare parts. There were talks about how to gain access to unwanted embryos (also know as abortion products).

The moral opposition was based on the ghoulish statements of proponents who tried to say harvesting young human beings was simply removing cells and not destroying a human individual. Their claims were fantasy and the science backed up the opponents of ESCR. Claiming they weren’t wrong then is not going to fly folks. We can move on and those who made huge errors in judgement due to their ignorance need to learn a lesson from their mistakes. And that less is NOT they were not mistaken – they were. The sooner they face up to that fact the sooner they can begin to regain some semblance of credibility.

4 responses so far

4 Responses to “More Media Ignorance On Stem Cells”

  1. Dorf77 says:
    November 22, 2007 at 8:03 pm

    Wrong place but I am here. Think of the terrorists as various Cancers on the body politic. As with cancer there is usually no large C cure, only treatments ( been thru one). Terrorism is a symptom or method which seems to be the current way of the afflicted to the heart of the comfortable. Each form (of terrorism) can and will be made useless to the practitioner when it bothers enough.

    That’s All Folks (said the pig)

  2. crosspatch says:
    November 23, 2007 at 2:43 pm

    The media is just stupid in general. They are simply selling ads. Even Fox does it. You go to their front page where you are shown some assortment of ads … then you see an article (taken just now from their front page) with the headline of “Tandem Typhoons: Thousands Flee ‘Super’ Storms”. So you might click on that story (and be shown a few more ads … cha ching!) only to discover that neither storm is a “super” storm and the one closest to landfall is only barely a typhoon (83mph winds).

    So the media knows that there are many interested in the embryonic stem cell issue (on both sides) so they will fan the flames of interest to keep people clicking on stories with teaser headlines and plain misreporting if it gets more people to read the stories (and therefore more ads being shown.)

    ANYONE who believes that the mission of a modern commercial news network is to inform is living with a severe case of cranial rectosis. The mission is to succeed in a market, it is a business. The goal is more advertising sales and more advertising views and they will publish whatever they can get away with that will accomplish that goal. It works with stem cell stories just like it worked with that typhoon story I noted. It got me to click on the link … they showed me an ad, they got paid for showing me that ad (if I click or not … they get MORE if I click).

    The purpose of news is to get people to read it, not to be “accurate” or to “inform”.

  3. MerlinOS2 says:
    November 23, 2007 at 3:25 pm

    A good summary of what is happening from a post over at Red State

    Finally getting to the present research, what these scientists have now developed is basically a way to format disks—to wipe all the information off of them so that they 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 scientists used in order to do about the same thing, possibly 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 not have been pursued with such urgency, only yielding results at a far later date.

  4. MerlinOS2 says:
    November 23, 2007 at 5:43 pm

    Well it seems that even the WSJ gets it quicker than the turn around in Iraq

    Reprogramming now allows us to exploit the advantages of embryonic stem cells without destroying human embryos. Here’s how it works: Adult cells are obtained from a skin biopsy by a procedure no more painful than a blood draw. The skin cells are grown in culture and then treated with a combination of four reprogramming factors, inserted into the adult cells with a gene-therapy virus. Within two to three weeks, the combined effect of these factors converts some of the adult skin cells into induced pluripotent state cells (iPSCs).

    Remarkably, iPSCs have all the relevant properties that make embryonic stem cells so attractive: They grow indefinitely and can produce all cell types. The senior scientist of the American team is James Thomson, who first described human embryonic stem cells in 1998. Thus, his conclusion that iPSCs are virtually identical to embryo-derived stem cells carries special weight.

    The induced pluripotent cells are actually superior to embryo-derived stem cells in one critical respect: They are patient-specific and hence will not be rejected by the immune system of the person from whom they are derived. The ability to generate embryonic stem cells matched to a particular person was the main reason for efforts to produce human embryos by so-called therapeutic cloning. Now even the scientist who generated “Dolly” the sheep and developed mammalian cloning, Ian Wilmut from Scotland, has concluded that direct reprogramming is a superior method for this purpose. He recently announced that he is abandoning cloning research and is focusing his efforts on direct reprogramming.

  5. MerlinOS2 says:
    November 23, 2007 at 5:45 pm

    Reprogramming now allows us to exploit the advantages of embryonic stem cells without destroying human embryos. Here’s how it works: Adult cells are obtained from a skin biopsy by a procedure no more painful than a blood draw. The skin cells are grown in culture and then treated with a combination of four reprogramming factors, inserted into the adult cells with a gene-therapy virus. Within two to three weeks, the combined effect of these factors converts some of the adult skin cells into induced pluripotent state cells (iPSCs).

    Remarkably, iPSCs have all the relevant properties that make embryonic stem cells so attractive: They grow indefinitely and can produce all cell types. The senior scientist of the American team is James Thomson, who first described human embryonic stem cells in 1998. Thus, his conclusion that iPSCs are virtually identical to embryo-derived stem cells carries special weight.

    The induced pluripotent cells are actually superior to embryo-derived stem cells in one critical respect: They are patient-specific and hence will not be rejected by the immune system of the person from whom they are derived. The ability to generate embryonic stem cells matched to a particular person was the main reason for efforts to produce human embryos by so-called therapeutic cloning. Now even the scientist who generated “Dolly” the sheep and developed mammalian cloning, Ian Wilmut from Scotland, has concluded that direct reprogramming is a superior method for this purpose. He recently announced that he is abandoning cloning research and is focusing his efforts on direct reprogramming.