From National Review Online:
Living, breathing people who have been treated by stem cells — some who would have otherwise died — are signs of the great hope of stem-cell research. Take Doug Rice, a bear of a man who was told he had months to live because of heart disease, yet after being treated with his own blood stem cells, his heart function is almost normal. Then there’s Dave Foege who also received the same treatment for his ailing heart, after his doctors had sent him home to hospice. And accident victim Jacki Rabon can walk with the aid of braces after she had her own nasal stem cells injected into her spinal-cord injury. Carol Franz is an incredible woman who suffered from multiple myeloma, a bone cancer, until she had her bone-marrow stem cells transplanted. Stephen Sprague has been free from leukemia after having a cord blood stem cell transplant. And Keone Penn no longer has sickle-cell anemia after receiving a cord-blood stem-cell transplant.
I support stem-cell research that is treating people now — the kind that saves and changes lives without destroying life. The aforementioned did not involve research that requires the destruction of human embryos…
Neither human embryonic-stem-cell research, which the administration has funded to the tune of over $150 million over the past several years, nor human cloning, has treated anyone of any disease.
2 Comments on “Patients not Politics”
I really hope that, when the chasm is even greater, when adult stem cell treatments (and maybe cures) are being approved, rapid-fire, by the FDA, and becoming an everyday occurrence, when the biological obstacles in embryonic research are proving too daunting, we’ll see an international “OOPS” from everybody who kept undervaluing the former and overinflating the latter.
I share your hope…but I wouldn’t hold my breath. They’re more likely to just ignore their disdain for this area of research as if they never even had it. What’s even more likely, they would probably take credit for its success for having always been in favor of the advancement of “stem cell research” – that term they like to use when they’re really only referring to one kind.