My biggist problem with the outright lie about fetal stem cell research comes from people coming at it from politics... (claims of) "Here's the future for cures, people will be able to walk again." These claims were made for political gain based on a lie.

Based on a lie and built on a foundation of quicksand. The greatest scientific sophistry of the young 21st century is this macabre joke of using aborted babies' stem cells to see if mayyyybe we can coax spinal tissue or neurons or whatever from them, like Frankenstein might try. Nothing close to a usable amount of tissue has yet been created from these cells, or any other kind of stem cells, for that matter (though umbilical and adult cells seem to show more promise). Everything touted about these cells is speculation. Seems like it's a good new-age cover to legitimize abortion and making embryos for the sake of harvesting stem cells...

No one has a clue where fetal stem cell research will lead at all, and won't for 20 years.

That's optimistic. Richard Nixon declared war on cancer c. 1971, and we're now using DC to -try- to advance what so far has been pretty futile research. At least we know what cancer does and (partially) how it forms. We know genes and the genome and have chemo drugs, etc. Stem cells are a fool's errand; the research done with them flies in the face of the scientific method. Everyone studying them or supporting the research assumes something good will come from them and is working (or reasoning) backward from that conclusion, rather than just looking at them and experimenting without making the result a foregone conclusion. And they're using murdered babies, too...

-Real- scientists are getting results right now in adult stem cell research. To put out bad science, to blatantly lie about things is one thing. If you want a political team, it's fine by me. But I will not let a blatant lie go by and not say something.

Neither will I. I join you. If you want to use fetal/embryonic stem cells, use the ones from miscarriages or stillbirths. Abortion is already murder, and that puts those stem cells off limits (or should). We'd never condone using stem cells from the bodies of exectued Chinese prisoners, many of whom are innocent and thus are homicides. So why will we legitimize the execution of the unborn? We ought to be trying abortionists for their shot at the hangman's noose, not indirectly lauding their horrors by using the byproducts of their own insane "medicine".

Think about what kind of snake oil someone's trying to sell for his own purposes. Telling people they are staying in their wheelchairs because Bush does not support fetal stem cell research, and top it off by not mentioning it is federal dollars not being used. Any private company can do the research.
Notice that no private company wants to pour millions into this... good reason for that.

All politics as we know it is snake oil, especially when the emotions come into play. Certain factions of our political system love to play to the emotions, as they seem always to trump reason and fact. You don't put Barbra Streisand on a platform and have her tell people that Clinton should not be impeached if you're using a fact-based approach to argument.

We may see federal money used for this quackery, even with us running a $1T deficit- a fact the press loves to ignore. Indeed, private companies will not touch this hand grenade... they have ethics, for the most part, while the government has nothing but the temerity to be as it is. They also know that throwing $10M, $20M, $100M at something without a guarantee of -anything- is bad business sense. The feds don't care about that... they just love spending money and feeling important.

Put the federal (research dollars) into programs like this... that show real promise. Stop playing stupid, irresponsible political games with people's lives, which is what I call misdirecting resources better used on programs getting results now.

If the feds put their unused flops into what we're doing, we could get 100x more done, if not more. Federal PC's would be crunching so much that Rosetta and others would have to come out with mew WU's constantly just to keep up. We'd have these diseases cured, or at least under control. Nope, we'd rather just play politics...

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