This week the House is supposed to vote on the Stem Cell Research Enhancement Act, S. 5. This is the bill to expand federal funding for embryonic stem cell research and is expected to pass, though the President is still expected to veto it when it makes it to his desk. In an interview with Life News, Family Research Council’s Tony Perkins rightly points out that Congress is wasting time (and money) focusing on ESCs that are nowhere close to helping patients, and may never, while ASCs are doing just that:
“Is it just me or is something wrong with that picture?” he told LifeNews.com.
“While Congress fritters away its time on science that has yielded little in the way of real treatments, the journal Cell Proliferation has published a study on adult stem cells extracted from the umbilical cords of newborns,” he said.
He’s referring to the study that shows ASCs have successfully been engineered to produce insulin and are a step closer to treating patients with diabetes. Our country, it seems, is obsessed with ESC research. This is of course due to the incredible hype surrounding it – CURES CURES CURES!! Why else would our politicians be spending so much time and trying to spend so much money on something so unproven and ineffective? I am afraid that many in the scientific and political field are pushing to advance life destroying research to the detriment of more promising research that has been successful in treating a growing number of diseases and disabilities. That is why some feel they can’t wait for U.S. scientists to prove new adult stem cell therapies safe or effective and spend tens of thousands of dollars to seek treatments out of the country. In my home state, a very large research institute held off building new research facilities until they were assured in a constitutional amendment that they could conduct ESC/human cloning research without any restrictions or legislative oversight, and they’re still complaining. Instead they could have been advancing ethically sound research that actually leads to “stem cell therapies and cures”.
This is not to say that the research is not being done here of course. In fact I think a number of medical and scientific professionals are catching on to the reality of stem cell research, that is, the promise and effectiveness of ASCs over ESCs. The proof of the pudding is in the eating, as they say, and right now ASC research is chowing down. If only our politicians could understand that.
Contact your rep.
Adult stem cell research archives
Americans for Research Ethics