"We don't go to movies, plays, or shows...

[jere7my]

...we're just a couple of frozen embryos!"

The Decider has just signed the first Presidential veto of his illustrious six years in office. He's putting the boot on embryonic stem cell research, something 70% of Americans, the entire mainstream scientific community, and 63 senators think has great promise for curing Alzheimer's, diabetes, Parkinson's, Lou Gehrig's disease, and a host of other ailments. Bush is opposed to "murder," says Tony Snow; no word yet on how they plan to prosecute the fertility clinic workers who routinely flush these blastulas down the sink.

There's a nice (liberal) overview of the state of things at Daily Kos. And Thinkprogress has a charming video of Sen. Brownback of Kansas telling the Senate about Hannah, who used to be a frozen embryo. Hannah had drawn a big sign that said "WE'RE KIDS I LOVE YOU." And it had pictures. "Here is another frozen embryo—these are embryos—that’s sad because he’s still sitting in a frozen state," he said. "And then here’s one that as she explains is saying 'What, are you going to kill me?'"

I watched all this on C-SPAN with slack-jawed amazement yesterday. There's not much I can do, but I can at least clear up a couple of misconceptions:

• These are blastulas, not embryos. This means they are bundles of 50-150 mostly undifferentiated cells which you could barely see without a microscope. They do not have differentiated gender characteristics, hearts, brains, or nerves.


• Adult stem cells might prove as useful as embryonic stem cells, if we can get them to differentiate the way eSC's do. But, as with anything else in science, this is only a line of inquiry with potential benefits someday, and the mainstream scientific community doesn't feel it's as promising or likely as eSC's. Both lines of inquiry should be funded, and more funding should go to the more promising line.


• eSC's don't automatically cause cancer. They can grow teratomas if improperly applied. This is true of many medical treatments with dangerous side effects. (In fact, growing a teratoma is the way to check if you have a good stem cell line, since that demonstrates the cells differentiating.)


• Even if every single one of these 400,000 blastulas were adopted and implanted, over 90% of them would still die. Blastulas that have been frozen for under five years have a 10% chance of successful implantation, and the chances drop after that.


• The Right has been hammering on this quote: "The results were 'absolutely devastating,' Dr. Paul Greene, a neurologist and researcher, reported in the Omaha World-Herald. 'It was tragic, catastrophic. It’s a real nightmare. And we can’t selectively turn it off.'" Greene implanted stem cells in Parkinson's patients, and five of the twenty got worse rather than better. This is tragic, but it's par for the course for early treatments, and they know what they did wrong. (They implanted the grafts in an undamaged part of the putamen, assuming that all of the putamen was equally damaged. This caused that bit to work extra-well, secreting too much dopamine. It has nothing to do with eSC therapies in general. [link])


• The Right is quite correct that there have been more therapies emerging from aSC's (adult stem cells) than eSC's. eSC research has been going on for eight years, with severely crippled funding; aSC research has been going on for thirty years, with lots of cash thrown at it. eSC's are considerably more promising, and don't offer the same hurdles aSC's do.

There are moral objections to embryonic stem cell research, and I can respect them. The trouble is, those moral objections are a minority view, and to broaden their appeal the Right is being deliberately mendacious and obfuscating.

I'll close with an astonishing pro-life argument against this research: "We should listen to the advice of a country that has, in the past, crossed the moral line of human experimentation. Johannes Rau, President of Germany, vehemently argued against cloning..." [link to the Life Issues Institute]

Yes, folks, "We should take their advice because they used to be Nazis."

Comments

[fiddledragon.livejournal.com]

Yes, they actually said, "We should take their advice because they used to be Nazis."

I feel like that's actually not a bad argument -- they made a catastrophic mistake, and they're trying to prevent other people from making the same mistake. In this case, I don't think we are making the same mistake, but that's beside the point.

[shipwright.livejournal.com]

You, sir, just made my day. And said all of the things I've been wanting to say, only much better (and far more comprehensively). May I say that I Endorse This Post?

also, I am inordinately amused that the far-right's arguments against eSC research incorporate both Nazis AND cancer, two of the biggest scare-words of the past forty years*.

* I'm not saying this to deemphasize the devastating effects of a horrible disease, nor to make light of the atrocities of the Nazi regime. However, one must agree that the threat of the big C and the comparison of this or that to Nazi Germany are bandied about rather generously nowadays.

[ultranurd.livejournal.com]

Ugh, who came up with "snowflake families"???

[eclectic-boy.livejournal.com]

Sen. Arlen Specter, a Republican from Pennsylvania, who has survived two types of cancer, said he believed "it is a clear-cut question to use embryos to save lives, because otherwise they will be destroyed." Fertility clinics hold about 400,000 unneeded embryos, he said, and only 128 have been "adopted" by families that played no role in creating them. "A century from now people will look back in amazement that we could even have this debate when the issues are so clearly cut," Specter said.

Sen. Rick Santorum, a Republican from Pennsylvania, a leading opponent of the House bill, sharply disagreed. "Since that little embryo doesn't have a pair of eyes and a color hair, doesn't have a name, it's very easy to dismiss this entity as insignificant," he said. "So we just kind of claim that there is a cloud as to what this is, and that allows us then to destroy that life and use it for our purposes."

As usual, Doonesbury was on top of this issue decades ago. I can't locate the rest of this particular week's strips, but here's the lead-off one.

[tapas.livejournal.com]

The Texas senators split on this one with Hutchinson voting for and Cornyn against. I so rarely agree with my senators that I took the opportunity to write Hutchinson and thank her. I also think it's important to support the rare Republican attempt to defy the president. Having done that, I thought I might as well write Cornyn and express my disappointment with his vote and my hope that he might reconsider if there were an attempt to override the veto. I don't think it'll do any practical good in the short term, but I know they keep tallies of these things so perhaps being vocal now can sway the long term outcome. And I have this fear that the other side is succeeding in part because they're more vocal even if they are less numerous.

Y'all can see how your own senators voted here:

http://www.govtrack.us/congress/vote.xpd?vote=h2005-204