Bush Pwnt?Follow

Not to be a picky pete, but since when has this fucking piece of shit cared about wether or not human lives were being destroyed?

First, I'm glad you actually do read science articles. Having yet another science discussion with you where you adamently refuse to actually look at the peer reviewed science isn't appealing.

So I guess when the science agrees with your pre-concieved notions you bother to read it?

Second, note that at the end of the article: "Opponents of ESC note that dozens of conditions are being treated with non-embryonic stem cells already around the world, whereas ESCs have yet to be used successfully on humans." (ESC stands for embreyonic stem cell). Or just read the wikipedia article on stem cell: <i>there are many kinds of stem cells - they aren't all created equal</i>.

\begin{science lesson}
The key feature of ESCs is called pluripotency: the ability to become any cell in the body. Despite the vast array of other stem cells (which can be harvested, even from adults), all the excitement about amneotic stem cells (denoted AFS in the article) is they (1) are close to (or maybe are) pluripotent: see, for example, http://www.webmd.com/content/article/131/117997
and they don't tend to form tumors (are not tumorigenic) like ESCs are infamous for. (The article claims that AFS are multi- not pluri-potent).
\end{science lesson}

The Nature:Biotechnology article has not yet been published. At a minimum, you probably want to give it six months for other scientists to try to reproduce the results before actually forming policy or claiming anyone is going to "pwn" anyone over anything.

However, this is the assylum, so keep up the grand tradition.

The actual article is at:
http://www.nature.com/nbt/journal/v25/n1/abs/nbt1274.html
where I think you all should be able to read the abstract. Few, I suspect, will be able to download the pdf of the article without paying US$30 to nature.com.

A quick glance at the abstract assures me you are (yet again) simply totally misinformed. The article authors don't claim this.

So I guess when the science agrees with your pre-concieved notions you don't bother to really read it?

By the way, I'm really excited about AFS. Even so, it is one article and even if AFS are everything the article says they are, I still would fund ESC research for years to come because they are very different creatures and ESC have far greater potential.

Ok. Couple issues with this:



They *also* don't know exactly how many different cell types can be made from embryonic stem cell either.



May not? Isn't that another way of saying "we don't know if embryonic stem cells can do more "tricks" then amniotic stem cells"? It just seems to me that given the ethical concerns over ESC, doens't it make more sense to pursue research on amniotic stem cells and if and *only if* we run into blocks that we believe can only be overcome by using ESC *then* discuss that research?

Dunno. Just makes sense to me. What's funny if that I'll bet that if this was any other area of research with ethical issues attached, most of those arguing for ESC would be arguing the exact opposite case in that alternative. If instead of stem cells we were talking about government grants to large corporations to do R&D on alternative fuels, they'd be firmly advocating that we spend money on the most "green" alternative, even if it was less effective and might take longer to become viable.

How many times have we had debates about researching non-renewable fuels? Take a gander at which people support which position and compare to this issue. Isn't it odd that it seems that ethics don't matter when there's a political issue on the line? Saying that the choice is about which is more viable *today* is pretty blatantly false. While maybe some might take that position, I think that most people arguing for ESC are doing so entirely because those who they consider the political "enemy" have taken the other position...

Contrarian politics at it's worse IMO.




Say's the guy who's working on cloning human embryos. I'm curious if his "host of other interesting questions" have *anything* to do with the promised cures, or if they have far more to do with his own experiments with cloning? I seem to recal that pretty much everyone is opposed to that line of research. Kinda invalidates his opinion I think.




The only one who said that was Daley. He was not involved in the research, but was presumably quoted to present an alternative view. Given his own self interest, I'd take his opinion with a huge grain of salt.


And Yossarian? If you had read the various articles on the subject, you'd see that the "big breakthrough" was the research results showing that amniotic stem cells *are* pluripotent (or at least as demonstably pluripotent as any ESC's we've worked with so far).

The point is that the key element that makes ESC important scientifically is also present in amniotic stem cells. Assuming their findings are accurate and amniotic stem cells are truely pluripotent, then there is little reason to continue research on ESC. It would be like continuing research into telegraph systems after figuring out how to make telephones. Certainly, there's no reason at all to spend federal dollars on it.

Sure. He doesn't want to be the guy who screwed a bunch of his peers out of funding. Want to guess how much pressure he got to make that statement? His reasearch data speaks for itself. His statement about funding is a scientist talking about funding. Those really are two different things. Did he happen to say *why* it was essential? Was it essential in order to be able to generate cures to things like Alzhiemers and Parkinsons? Or is it essential to the furtherance of some of his prominent peer's careers (and his likelyhood of ever being invited to give a talk anywhere or ever publish a book again)?

Maybe I'm jaded, but I've seen enough of how the peer support and funding support processes works to not see this as anything more then a scientist releasing findings honestly, then realizing that it would ***** many influential people in his field out of funding and doing everything he could to prevent it after the fact. His findings were that those cells were pluripotent, not just multipotent. That's the key (and arguably *only*) reason to pursue funding of ESC.

Again. Assuming that that finding is accurate, there's simply no reason to fund ESC. The federal government should not be in the business of funding ethically questionable science because it *might* produce something that we can't produce using more ethical means.



Your second quote is irrelevant. Arguing that since a mistaken conclusion was drawn once that we must assume a second conclusion is *also* wrong is fallacious. The mistake in that case as not understanding the difference between multipotent and pluripotent. A reasonable one given the early stages of the science at that point. If you can find me a paper/source that states that there's some feature of ESC beside's its pluripotency that makes it necessary, I'll be glad to re-assess my position on this.


I guess my problem with this is the willingness of many people to rush into supporting new science without considering its ramifications. Us Conservatives are looking at the science, having some concerns with the ethics of that science and asking the reasonable question: "Is there an alternative way of doing the same thing that does not contain these ethical problems"? Have there been some overzealous assumptions made? Certainly. However, as I touched on earlier, the alternatives present in stem cell research are vastly more available, reasonable, and viable to check out then say alternative fuel sources. Yet I don't see most of you bashing folks when they argue that solar power is the wave of the future, or hydrogen cells, or any of a number of other alternatives that so far have not come close to what was initially promised or even hoped.

To look at it another way: If we could go back in time to the early 20th century. Let's say that there were two simultaneous research possibilities, both with similar costs and similar potential for results. One was in using crude oil to generate power and run vehicles, the other was some kind of cold fusion (insert future alternative power here). Pretend that somehow magically they both were equally viable with the technology of the day and would cost equal amoiunts of money to research and as far as anyone could tell held equal potential for results. Can you think of any reason to spend time drilling oil?

That's essentially where we are with stem cell research. Obviously, in the case of power, we did not have a magical, economically similar alternative with significantly less environmental impact to choose. Today, with stem cell research we do. Why *not* make the "right choice" now?

What funding? The Federal funding that's banned from them? The funding that Bush was going to veto anyway? That funding? Yeah, I guess if my big trump card to make Bush "pwnt" the Democrats on the issue was completely blown out of the water, I'd start making up claims and rationalizations as well.

Hey, ******. If amniotic stem cells were, for all practical purposes, idential to embryonic ones, it would open up a fucking floodgate of funding for those scientists to do the exact same work they've been begging for the funding to do. In fact, those scientists will have a host of new potential projects to get funded just from this study (assuming it all pans out) but they still believe that they could learn more if they could use embryonic cells.

Look, keep using the big words you found in some article to try to look educated on the issue. I still remember you claiming that you could only get embryonic stem cells by forcing women to get abortions. If you think you have more credibility than multiple scientists closely related to the study, you're out of your mind.

I understand where you're coming from though. You thought you had this major thing and now it'll play like this:
Republican Guy: "We have a study here proving that we don't need to use embryonic stem cells!"
Democratic Guy: "Yeah, about that -- we have the author of that study stating explictly that his findings should not be taken to mean that embryonic research shouldn't be funded."
Republican Guy: "He's.. umm.. lying! Lying so his peers don't get screwed out of the funding they've never had!"

Any port in a storm, eh Gbaji?Will you? Will you really? Or will you say that they're only protecting their own interests like you said about Daley when he stated that "they are not a substitute for human embryonic stem cells, which allow scientists to address a host of other interesting questions in early human development"? Or will you say that they're protecting the non-existant funding of their peers? Or what other out-of-your-*** rationalizations and blind guesses will you make to avoid from admitting that you're wrong?

Another late edit to include this:More conflicts of interest and stuff I'm sure, so there's no reason to assume that a man specializing in neurons derived from stem cells would know better about the differences between embryonic and amniotic derived cells than Gbaji. In fact, we should assume that any person related to the medical and scientific fields who says that amniotic stem cells shouldn't substitute for funding embryonic cells is lying to protect their own interests and/or is buckling under peer pressure. But the politicans who are told about the study and decide what it means will never lead us astray.

Finally, a collection of other assorted statements made regarding the study. I'm interested to hear any reports you have of researchers in the field saying "Nope, this pretty much does it." I know, I know... they're all hiding the truth.

Edited, Jan 15th 2007 9:19pm by Jophiel

Look from a merely medical point of view, we let people have abortions at will. So what is the big deal about using stem cells to help cure disease? It isn't going to change the abortion rate, just what you do with the by products.
So instead of being trashed, which is what actually happens, the stem cells will be harvested.

It doesn't have to be any more complex than that!!

Posted: Jan 16th 2007 1:26am
By: Master Shogen
Guru

Isn't it past your bedtime?

Embryonic stem cells aren't gleaned from abortions (those would be fetal stem cells) but rather from unused fertilized eggs remaining from IVF processes. The embryo at this stage is (I believe) all of four to sixteen cells in mass and is composed of cells which has the potential to become any cell in the human body.

The IVF process involves removing 4-8 eggs from the female, artifically fertilizing them in a lab, freezing the embryos and implanting one or two into the woman in hopes that they'll "take" and adhere to the uterus. If not, they have extra embryos ready to try with. If it does, you have a handful of embryos which you don't really need.

What happens to them after that is one of a couple things -- they are discarded (typically through incineration), they are donated to medical research or they are donated to the Snowflake Baby program where infertile women can attempt to have one implanted. The third option is the one Bush always talks up and acts as if every embryo used in science is a Snowflake Baby unborn but that's simply not the case. According to their own numbers, the Snowflake program says it has thawed 1191 embryos in the last ten years, conducted 222 "transfers" which resulted in 104 pregancies. According to the Snowflake site, there are over 400,000 frozen embryos currently. (I pulled those numbers from an old post instead of relooking them all up but I doubt it's changed much since June). The Snowflake program, good as it is, simply isn't a popular option for the parents of the embryos and the vast, vast majority of excess embryos are destroyed. Research isn't an avenue much discussed or pursued mainly because of the federal funding bans on embryos which, understandably, cuts down on demand.

If embryonic stem cell research is federally funded, it will not cause any loss of life. Few, if any, parents would say "We were going to donate our embryos to the Snowflake program, but donating them to science sounds like a much better option". A considerably greater number of parents would think "It's better that our extra embryos may potentially provide a cure for Parkinson's than to have them turned to ash in some medical kiln." And I'd agree with them.

Speaking of, Louise Brown just had a baby.

First off. Let me be *really* clear. I'm not talking about tossing all research in ESC out the window (although I do suspect that it'll shift if the amniotic stuff takes off). I'm talking about the ridiculousness of Congress tying to pass a bill requring the federal government to fund the harvesting of new ESC lines at this time.

ESC has been researched for years. However, the progress made has actually been very minimal. Lot's of promsing results. Lot's of problems encountered along the way (like tumors for example). In the same period of time, adult stem cell research has progressed much farther, to actual treatments on actual human patients. I don't point that out to say we need to ignore research into pluripotent stem cells (which ESC are), but to show the relative lack of progress using ESC.

The point is that the hard part of working with ESC is the very feature that makes them valuable. Pluripotency. The ability to be "programmed" to form into any type of cell and therefore potentially "cure" many types of illnesses. The reason why ESC is progressing slowly is that pluripotent cells are difficult to coax into doing what you want. You could certainly leave them in their natural state and let them develop into a normal human (oversimplified of course), but that's not what we want them for. We want to be able to take "generic" pluripotent cells and then program them to do whatever we want. That's a lot more tricky then taking stem cells that are already programmed to be bone tissue, or heart tissue, or brain tissue and stimulating them into reproducing so we can repair damaged tissue of the same type in a human body. The problems with dealing with pluripotency is one of the reasons they've had problems with tumors erupting in their experiments (cells grow out of control and in ways they didn't intend).

While we've got a lot of research specifically dealing with the harvesting and culturing of ESC, we've not even come close to licking the problems involved with the pluripotent nature of the cells themselves. Basicaly, the easy stuff that is specific to ESC is done, but the hard stuff that's somewhat specific to pluripotent cells is still a long road in front of us. Amniotic cells are *also* pluripotent. They're potentiall easier to harvest then ESC, can be harvested in greater numbers, and present no ethical concerns. Of course, we'd also have to deal with the hurdles before us presented by the pluripotent nature of those cells, but we're really not that far along with ESC on that issue either.

And even better, what little experimenting they've done with the pluripotent nature of amniotic stem cells show that they have less problems with tumors then ESCs do. Thus, we could likely get to human usable cures using pluripotent cells in shorter time using amniotic stem cells, even though we might be starting out a few years behind in total research. When you add in the lack of ethical problems obtaining the cells to use in the first place, it's pretty much a no-brainer that this is a far more practical direction to take the research at this time.

Certainly, it makes no sense to spend time forcing the government to lift a ban on funding for new ESC harvesting. Let ESC continue with what they've got. Maybe in 10-15 years when/if they figure out how to overcome the problems they've run into and if they find that they can do things with ESC that can't be done with amniotic cells, *then* we can revisit the issue of whether to fund the harvesting of new lines. Right now, we just plain don't need to.



You totally missed what I was getting at. The thing we've been funding for years is the drilling and refining of oil, with research money spent to find more deposists. One day, we discover some magical technology that could totally replace oil in every way, and does not damage the environment. Yet, for some bizarre reason some people insist not only on continuing funding for "oil research", but want to lift bans currently imposed to protect wildlife preserves or something equally unlikable.

I'm betting most of those for more ESC research are opposed to drilling in ANWAR, yet the alternatives in that case are far less relatively viable then the alternative presented by amniotic stem cells in relation to ESC. We don't have a magical alternative power source available, yet many oppose more drilling on ethical grounds. Odd that they'll do this in the case of oil drilling but *not* in the case of ESC. I'm just pointing out that oddity.



As I already pointed out. While "he" may not be recieving funding for ESC specifically, many many of his peers are. There's a reason they came up with the term "peer pressure". It applies even moreso in the science/research community then it did when you were a kid. Unbelievably so if you haven't seen it yourself.



Again. We *are* researching both. The issue is over increasing funding in an area that is ethically questionable (harvesting of new ESC lines, which requires destroying embryos) when there is a viable alternative method to obtain pluripotent stem cells without such ethical baggage attached. At the very least is seems reasonable to delay such funding for new harvesting until we're sure we have no other way to obtain pluripotent cells.

That's "reasonable" IMO. But for some reason the Democratic Congress made this issue part of their platform and agenda instead. That's "unreasonable". I also think it's monumentally stupid. When Bush vetoed this bill last summer, there were a lot of people questioning his decision. At that time, there was only a hint that there might be some methods to obtain pluripotent cells without having to destroy an embryo to do it. His veto could be seen as an act of faith rather then an act of science. This time, with the information about the successes with amniotic stem cells, his veto looks a lot more grounded in science. More people are going to see it as a reasonable action that is both ethical and sensible. And many people are going to wonder what the heck the Dems are thinking making a big issue about this.

In otherwords, the Dems are pwnt, not Bush.

I'd like to point out that it was a strong bipartisan vote.

Carry on.

Who?

You know what'll happen? The Bush side will try to say "But we have amniotic stem cells!" and the Democrats will turn right around and present Dr. Atala saying "I did that study and Bush is wrong."

End of story. The average voter is not going to listen to folks like you ramble on for ten pages and pretend that they're suddenly masters of the scientific community because, last week, they learned what "pluripotent" meant. They are, instead, more likely to listen to guy the in a lab coat who can speak in plan English and say "My study should not be taken to mean that we should not fund embryonic research because embryonic research is still very important to advance this science and it is and something I support."

Those opposed to the research will, of course, flail about and say that the scientists don't know what they're talking about or else try to misuse the studies as shown earlier. But they were a lost cause anyway.

Edited, Jan 16th 2007 5:10pm by Jophiel