Suppose we woke to the following headline with our morning coffee: Obama Administration to Fund 13 New Experimental HIV Drugs., followed by this secondary header- Activist Groups Outraged at Funding ‘Useless’ Class of Drugs over Proven Entity.
Indeed, suppose the story went on to describe how the President and the Democrats remained wedded to funding a class of drugs whose side-effects were so horrendous in animal research models that use in humans would be unthinkable.
Further suppose that the classes of drugs that have shown dramatic efficacy went underfunded, and were even ridiculed by the President and his fellow travelers. Imagine that states such as California floated $3 Billion bonds to float such useless research into drugs that couldn’t make it out of animal trials over drugs working in human HIV/AIDS patients. Imagine the outrage coming from the scientific and medical communities, from AIDS activists, AIDS patients and their loved ones.
There would be calls for Congressional hearings. There would be protests that would make the HIV protests of the 1980’s look tame by comparison.
Certainly people would wonder why. Why would the federal and state governments obstinately sink tens of billions of dollars into such fruitless research and allow other nations to capitalize on the existing research bearing good fruit?
Absent a mass delusion as an explanation, people would be looking for a smoking gun.
Thus it is with Embryonic Stem Cells (ESC”s) vs. Adult Stem Cells (ASC’s). Thus it has been this week with President Obama. Read it here.
When ESC proponents want to advance funding of these cell lines, they NEVER specify ESC v. ASC. Rather, they throw around the generic term ‘Stem Cells’ when speaking of their promise and current use in therapeutics. Recall that ESC’s are derived from tearing apart a human in its embryonic stage of development. ASC’s are derived from adults.
ESC’s have consistently shown themselves to be uncontrollable, growing wild and forming tumors in animals. They have yet to clear that hurdle before moving into human clinical trials. In India, one physician using ESC’s is purported to have her patients recovering slight function after spinal cord injuries. She will not divulge her methodology, and so remains highly suspect.
ASC’s, in contrast, have over a hundred therapeutic applications, none involving tumor formation. Some of these lack FDA approval and must be obtained overseas. They have been published in peer-reviewed journals.
So why the obstinate refusal to put the bulk of the money into ASC’s?
Abortion.
Obama and Co. cannot afford for people to begin developing sensitivity to the plight of embryonic humans, lest that awakening to the dignity of humans in the embryonic stage spill over into increased consciousness over abortion. That would mean the Democrats losing their central organizing principle, their raison d’etre. Pressing ahead with ESC’s is a buttress to support abortion.
It’s high-tech cannibalism.
It’s also already obsolete. Recently, we’ve been able to take skin cells from a patient and induce them into an ESC-like state. These are called Induced Pluripotent Stem Cells (iPSC’s). These have the advantage of being from the patients themselves, with no risk of tissue rejection. They are abundant, easy to obtain, easy to induce to pluripotency. Why not fund these instead?
Abortion.
Abortion has poisoned the body politic. It has claimed 52 million lives in the US since 1973. It has ruined countless millions of women’s lives, and now it is corrupting science.
Where are the denunciations of this wastefulness from the scientific and medical communities? Would this be allowed to stand if it were our HIV analogy instead? Not likely.
Abortion destroys everything it touches. That’s a good thing, as it will force us to eventually seek less recourse to it because of the wastefulness it unleashes on any society evil enough to seek its embrace.
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