Good, Bad, Indifferent -- Right Or Wrong -- This Is What Thinking Independents Are Reading -- August 13, 2024

Locator: 48399POLITICS.

Link here.

With that, I'm off for the day. Will blog again later this evening. Good luck to all.

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Close

At the close, Tuesday, August 13, 2024:

Note:

• NASDAQ: up 407 points
• DJIA: up 409 points

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The Book Page

From One Cell: A Journey Into Life's Origins And The Future Of Medicine, Ben Stanger, 2023.

From pages 217 - 219.

By the end of the 20th century, US researchers had made great strides in stem cell research, using stem cells from mouse embryos. Researchers presumed that generating human stem cells would be relatively straightforward, believing that the heavy lifting had already been cone by earlier researchers. But translating stem cell protocols from mouse to human turned out to be more complicated. Human embryos were, for some reason, less cooperative, and it became obvious that research would require new approaches.

Stem cells (and stem research), remember, was the holy grail to cure cancer and to treat diseases. 

But by the year 2000, an even bigger stumbling block emerged -- religious and ethical objections stemming from the fact that human stem cells came from human embryos. While there was not much outcry over using mouse embryos to make stem cells, destroying a human embryo was a different story. The very idea was unacceptable to millions of people, especially those who were unconditionally opposed to abortions. To them, it was irrelevant that the embryos -- tiny balls of a hundred calls or so -- were donated by couples who had undergone in vitro fertilization and no longer needed them. 

President George Bush struggled over this specific question, whether tax dollars should be used to fund research that used the products of destroyed embryos, even if those embryos were "leftovers" from fertility clinics, and were going to be destroyed anyway.

George Bush spoke to the nation from his ranch in Crawford, TX, on August 9, 2001 (just a month before the terrorist attacks on 9/11) on the issue and his decision. The Bush policy satisfied neither side and essentially put an end to federal government funding for stem cell research.

Remember, stem cells (and stem cell research) in the year 2000 was the holy grail to cure cancer and to treat diseases. And stem cell research used embryos that were being destroyed as a by-product of in vitro fertilization.

Ironically the story's denouement was completely unexpected, and entirely satisfying. Stem cell research "took off," becoming more successful than ever.