The Embryo’s New Clothes: A Modern Fairy Tale
“People need a fairy tale,” said Ronald D.G. McKay, a stem cell researcher at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, “Maybe that’s unfair, but they need a story line that’s relatively simple to understand.”
Translation: certain people are deliberately confusing the stem cell issue in order to promote a specific political agenda. I. Richard Garr, president and CEO of Neuralstem Inc., a private company in Gaithersburg, Md., working with adult neural stem cells, points out: "This is a field that has more hype in it than almost anything outside of professional wrestling."
As you might recall from high school biology, all of us started as a single cell, a fertilized egg in our mothers’ Fallopian tubes. By the time we reached the uterus, we had become embryos. As embryos, we implanted into our mothers’ wombs and eventually grew into the fine, upstanding people we are today. But all the hundreds of different kinds of cells we have in our bodies today came from that first cell and its progeny.
A stem cell is one of those very early cells; capable of turning into essentially any type of cell the body needs, depending on the mechanical and hormonal influences it is subject to. There are two kinds: embryonic stem cells (ESC) and adult stem cells (ASC).
ESCs come exclusively from embryos. Children are deliberately conceived in artificial conditions, allowed to grow to a specific stage of embryonic development, and then torn apart so their cells can be used for experimentation. Notice three things. (1) Embryos are torn apart, not fertilized eggs. (2) Thousands of embryonic children are being killed because, (3) this research is already happening. It just doesn’t receive government funding. Yet.
Researchers who support abortion pretend that ESCs are the best, the most easily adapted for treatment. But ESCs — unlike fetal and post-natal ASCs — don’t work. Worse, ESCs implanted into patients keep unsuccessfully trying to grow into babies, that is, they almost always produce tumors after implantation. "We have to find ways to minimize that," says Dr. Pamela Gehron Robey, at the National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research. That will require tearing apart thousands of children. Oh well.
But such carnage is completely unnecessary. ASCs already work. Every bone marrow transplant is ASC therapy: ASCs have already been used for decades to treat disease. Leukemias, immune system and other blood disorders, cancers, autoimmune diseases: the list is nearly 100 illnesses long, with more on the way. Adult stem cells work very well and they work right now. There are no moral issues involved with ASCs, absolutely no one is opposed to ASC research and thousands of people have benefited from ASC therapy.
Unlike ESCs, ASCs are found everywhere, in anyone who has gotten more than twelve weeks past conception. Umbilical cord blood is the best source because the cord is easy to get and discarded at birth, the newborn immune system is not very advanced and the harvested ASCs tend to be accepted by the recipient’s immune system. But, ASCs have also been harvested from adult blood, bone marrow, olfactory nerve endings, skin cells, even fat. That’s right. You can go ahead and eat that Big Mac. Just donate the results to science.
Unlike ASC therapy, ESC “therapy” has never successfully treated a single person. Not one. Typically, ESCs make people more sick or kill them. Less often, they simply have no effect. But even if they worked, it wouldn’t matter. We obtain ESCs only by tearing children apart. Just as we can’t kill Alzheimer’s patients and snatch their heart, lungs and kidneys in order to solve the organ transplant shortage, so we can’t kill children in order to snatch their embryonic stem cells.
So, we can use ASCs — a morally acceptable, medicinally useful stem cell therapy available today, or ESCs — a morally illicit, medicinally useless stem cell therapy that is not likely to ever work. Choose.
But wait! Why would embryonic stem cell researchers lie? Because private enterprise refuses to fund them. The ESC approach doesn’t work. Private enterprise does not stay in business by funding failure. These researchers need money to make their house payments. So, like the communists that Ronald Reagan fought, embryonic stem cell researchers deliberately mislead people like Michael J. Fox, Christopher Reeves, and Nancy Reagan in order to drum up public support for government subsidies.
On June 10th’s World News Tonight, Ned Potter and Dr. Michael Shelanski, Alzheimer’s researchers at Columbia University, hinted at this fraud:
Potter: “Stem cells, which are found in human embryos, may be able to replace almost any damaged cell in the body. But with Alzheimer’s it’s not the cell that need to be replaced.”
Shelanski: “The early changes of Alzheimer’s disease are a loss of the connections between nerve cells without death of the nerve cells themselves.”
So why aren’t embryonic stem cell researchers being exposed as frauds? Because tearing apart human embryos fits the political agenda supporting legal abortion. Journalists like Harold Anderson, Cokie Roberts, William Safire, Tom Brokaw, Barbara Walters, the crew of Good Morning America, the president of the Alzheimer’s Association, and a couple dozen Congressmen all push for more embryonic stem cell research precisely because they have either been actively lied to or they actively support legal abortion. Scientific research is being prostituted for political ends. The embryo has no clothes.
Steve Kellmeyer is a former resident of Norfolk, Nebraska. He writes frequently on issues of history, theology and medicine for magazines and newspapers across the nation. His work can be found at www.bridegroompress.com.
This item 6249 digitally provided courtesy of CatholicCulture.org
