Stem Cell Obfuscation
by Vince?Daliessio
To those on either side of the Republican / Democrat stem-cell pseudo-debate, articles like this one from Michael Fumento should kill it off as a divisive issue useable for fearmongering. Apparently, according to Fumento, not only do "Adult" stem cells?(AS) have more immediate application than "Embryonic" stem cells (ES), but they have been in medical use in this country since the 1950's.
I have long maintained that the widespread fear among the public?about cloning or genetic engineering is terribly overblown - the fact is that no one will use these technologies to create a race of "supermen" or "monsters" or "Hitlers", nor will it lead to large-scale creation of organisms for "spare parts". The fact is that the economic and ethical obstacles to doing so are insurmountable. For example, just how do you propose to feed, house, clothe, educate, and socialize these putative persons? Just as scary, and also just as impractical on a large scale is the reproductive cloning of humans. Remember the claims of those "scientists" a few years back that they had cloned a human? Remember thanking God that they hadn't, or, at least, that these people hadn't been the ones to do it?
No, the real ultimate use of these technologies will be to enable scientists to turn on a genetic "switch" in the diseased person's own cells to allow the afflicted?body part to repair itself, much like a lobster grows a new claw when it loses one. In this new medical future, a patient will simply take a pill, or sit under some kind of lamp, which will cause the body to set its own genetic switches to repair the tissue in question, then reset the switches to normal once a repair has been achieved. This new kind of medicine will be expensive at first, and difficult, but left up to the free market, it will become cheaply and widely available. This is the kind of technology that humans want, and will be willing to pay for.
This just goes to show that you should not try to get your medical, ethical, or scientific information from politicians.
