Nancy Reagan urges Bush to reconsider
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| Mon, 05-10-2004 - 7:20am |
She wants him to reverse his stand against stem cell research and is pictured with Michael J. Fox. Is this what it is going to take to convince Bush that his ideological stance against this research is wrong?
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/3700015.stm
Mrs Reagan said too much time had been wasted already discussing the issue.
She is said to believe the research could lead to a cure for Alzheimer's disease, which has afflicted her husband, Ronald Reagan.
The Bush administration has blocked public funding of this type of research because of his party's ethical reservations about embryo research.
At a fundraising dinner for the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation in Hollywood, Mrs Reagan said her husband was now in "a distant place where I can no longer reach him".
"I just don't see how we can turn our backs on this... We have lost so much time already. I just really can't bear to lose any more."
She said she believed stem cell research "may provide our scientists with many answers that for so long have been beyond our grasp".
It is thought to be the first time that Mrs Reagan has made a public speech on the issue, although her views have long been known.
Political debate
Mrs Reagan is the latest high-profile figure to criticise the Bush administration for its decision to limit funding for stem cell research.

Currently federal funds are not available for this type of work.
Mr Bush has told scientists he will not release US taxpayers' money for the production or investigation of new lines because it involves the destruction of human embryos.
Correspondents say that with the Bush administration and anti-abortion groups strongly opposed to stem cell research, Mrs Reagan's comments add a powerful conservative Republican voice to the debate.

Elaine
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In an AARP
It would greatly surprise me if he changes his mind.
Bush doesn't "do" changing his mind.
James
janderson_ny@yahoo.com
CL Ask A Guy
Thankgoodness other countries are continuing the research. Australia & Britain are two & I believe S. Korea.
>"The Republican senator from Pennsylvania focused his comments on his continuing frustration with the Bush administration’s current policy regarding human stem cell research, which restricts scientists to working with existing stem cell lines. Specter described the criminalization of this research as “scandalous” and bemoaned the loss of some of the top American scientists in this field to other countries where stem cell research is not limited.
Specter attributed the political obstacles stem cell research faces in large part to confusion over its definition. Nuclear transplantation is the process that leads to the creation of embryonic stem cells that can become almost any type of cell in the human body. Specter explained that opponents of stem cell research often equate this procedure — often labeled “therapeutic cloning” — to “reproductive cloning,��� the growth of an infant."<
Quote from..........
http://daily.stanford.edu/tempo?page=content&id=13235&repository=0001_article
Woo Suk Hwang and Dr. Shin Yong Moon of Seoul National University.
>"After harvesting 242 eggs from 16 female volunteers, Hwang and Moon removed the eggs' genetic material and replaced it with DNA extracted from adult cells donated by the same women. They then used tiny bursts of electricity to fuse together the donor material and egg. Nourished in dishes, 30 of the hybrid eggs developed into blastocysts-balls of hundreds of cells that represent one of the earliest stages of fetal development."<
>"That's what spooks cloning foes, since in this case, the resulting babies would have been not random mixes of two parents but perfect copies of the women who donated the DNA. That, however, is not what Hwang and Moon wanted. "We will never try to produce cloned human beings," Hwang said. What they do want to produce — and, in fact, did — is embryonic stem cells, the biological blank slates that develop into all the body's tissues. Thanks to stem-cell technology, people could become their own tissue donors with pristine, unrejectable cells at the ready to repair damage done by, say, Alzheimer's disease or spinal-cord injury. Stem-cell research in the U.S. has been hamstrung since the Bush Administration's 2001 decision restricting federal funding for the work to existing cell lines. In South Korea, which forbids human cloning only for reproductive purposes, the game is much more open.
Nobody pretends that Hwang and Moon's findings are ready for clinical application or that they don't raise some disturbing possibilities. But few people deny that they raise some thrilling ones too — precisely what science is supposed to do. "<
Quotes from.........
http://www.time.com/time/subscriber/2004/time100/scientists/100cloners.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/01/health/01cancer.html?adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1091454457-AVE8SoLLNXcmKolIddsX4g
A cloning experiment in mice indicates that for one type of cancer, at least, cancerous cells may be able to revert to normal.
But the study does not reveal a way to cure cancer. Instead, it addresses a theoretical question about the genetic nature of one type of cancer.
In their experiment, published in the current issue of the journal Genes and Development, the investigators cloned mouse embryos from a melanoma skin cancer cell. Using cells from these embryos, they created healthy adult mice who had some cells derived from the cloned cancer cells, showing that malignancy is not the inevitable fate of such cells.
Dr. Rudolf Jaenisch of the Whitehead Institute at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology worked on the study and is one of the country's leading experts in cloning. He said that while the genetic elements of cancer could not be reversed, the epigenetics, how the genes are actually turned on and off, could be.
Other experts cautioned that the study involved basic research with animals and was far from leading to a cancer cure for humans.
"This is actually an incredibly early basic science study done in animals," said Dr. Otis Brawley, a cancer researcher and professor at the Winship Cancer Institute at Emory University.
"Translating this sort of thing to human benefit would take years, maybe even decades," Dr. Brawley said. "Is this going to help some poor guy with melanoma today or some poor guy diagnosed with melanoma five years from now? No way."
In their paper, Dr. Jaenisch and his colleagues said they took the nucleus from a melanoma cell and injected it into a hollowed-out mouse egg cell. This started the egg growing as if it had been fertilized by sperm.
They did not allow this embryonic mouse to develop but harvested from it embryonic stem cells.
"It's important to note that the stem cells from the cloned melanoma were incorporated into most, if not all, tissues of adult mice, showing that they can develop into normal, healthy cells," said Dr. Robert Blelloch, one of the study investigators.
This could happen only if the cancer cells had lost their malignant qualities, at least temporarily, the researchers said.
The question that always pops into my mind when this type of comment is made is this: If we don't start the translation now, how will an advance ever be made in the future?
If you believe that life begins at conception how could you support this type of research? I realize that abortion and the dehumanizing of embryos and fetuses make it easier to stomach murdering these children. However, it doesn't change the fact that their young lives are being wiped out.
It is easy to take frozen embryos which seem so inhuman, "harvest" the stem cells from them and use them for scientific research. The problem is that you are "harvesting" the life from that child. You destroy a life in order to potentionally, some day, save another. You treat a human being like it is a crop or tool to be used.
The next obvious step is to simply clone these embryos to have easier access to stem cells. Yet we object to human cloning, Why? If an embryo is less than human, why not clone them. They aren't human, or are they? The answer is obvious.
The ends do not justify the means. How many would sacrifice their 5 year old child for research? None I would venture to say. Yet people think it is ok because these are just younger children who have had their development, frozen in time and then snuffed out completely. It is barbaric.
I don't care if Nancy Reagan and/or every other "conservative" supports it, it is still wrong. Nancy has been personally affected by a disease that *MAY* be helped by stem cell research. She is unable to make an impartial and emotionally free decision. I'm sorry for her loss but killing humans for research is just wrong.
"these are just younger children who have had their development, frozen in time and then snuffed out completely."............ "killing humans for research is just wrong."
I disagree with your POV that a few cells that have multiplied for a few days are, as you put it, children
By the same token, your religious beliefs render you in the same position. Science and religion have faught since the 14th century--science won, and it will win again, if not in the US then elsewhere in the world.
Edited 8/2/2004 6:36 pm ET ET by hayashig
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