To Clone or Not To Clone, What Was The Question?
Who knew Missouri would be the center of national attention in these elections with “stem cell research” as the defining issue? Apparantly Michael J. Fox did, but more on that later.
I live in Missouri and have seen, first hand, the endless advertising on both sides of the issue and I’ve done my own research, so here is my take. The Missouri Stem Cell Initiative is nothing more than corporate greed masked as compassion for the ill and afflicted. What this initiative is about is whether or not “the state” has the right to regulate stem cell research and the right to deny funding for research it deems inappropriate. Here’s the kicker, the state of Missouri has never passed any legislation regarding stem cell research and doesn’t spend much of any tax dollars on it, anyway! There is quite a bit of private research going on in Missouri right now and these big research companies are the ones pushing for this bill because it would force Missouri into funding programs for stem cell research.
The secondary issue is that this bill, if passed, would force tax payers to foot the bill for research involving human embryos. Some people have a problem with that…so why force them to pay taxes to support it, when the private sector is capable of doing it on its own.
Why does anybody, including Michael J. Fox want to get the government involved in this? If this research is so promising and cures for all kinds of diseases can come from it, don’t you think some big company would be pouring money into it. The payoff would be in the hundreds of billions of dollars. If you start throwing government red tape into that mix…so long profit.
The drug companies, you know the ones that own Republicans, stand to make millions off of bills like this, all with front money from tax payers like you and me. Let’s let their shareholders pay the cost of find the cures.
As for the Michael J. Fox commercial, Rush Limbaugh was right. Michael J. Fox is just another exploited victim used by the Democrats to claw their way back into power. You and I both know if Michaels mediacation had been working well that day and he didn’t jerk around on camera they would have post-poned filming and hid is pill bottle. If Michael was really interested in the good that stem cell research could do he would have done a commercial a long time ago asking people to invest in the drug companies who are trying to find a cure.
To clone or not to clone is not the question. The question is should stem cell research be publicly or privately funded? That is the bottom line and the last time I checked, we were paying enough taxes. Rest assured that if stem cell research becomes a publicly funded project and if Democrats get into power the next commercial Michael J. Fox does will be promoting the new tax increase “because peoples lives are at stake”.
Paul sez... Says: October 26th, 2006 at 1:54 am
What’s wrong with cloning?
kolran Says: October 27th, 2006 at 1:44 am
Nothing, just the liberals start whinning.
nutslikebush Says: October 28th, 2006 at 5:39 pm
clearly Limbaugh was the baby in this story. He makes up lies and then cries when his lies are pointed out by others. Then he threatens everyone with mutal assured distruction. His insurance policy is his self-victimization routine. In truth, he is a poster child for the tolerance of the mainstream media. If they were vindictive, they would wipe him out in short order. He spews more falsehoods daily than any other person in our country. Intelligent people just sit back and wonder how stupid the Ditto-heads must be to not see through his shallow, superficial, misinformed thinking and the outright falsehoods he spouts continuously. The more popular he is, the dumber our society is.
nutslikebush Says: October 30th, 2006 at 12:46 am
Buck,
Your post reflects a basic misunderstanding of how pharmaceutical and biomedical research work and the relationship between federally funded research and the biomedical industry. First, virtually all basic breakthrough research in biomedical and pharmaceutical science originates with research carried out in university laboratories and medical schools. Most of this research is federally funded by the National Institutes of Health. Grants for such research are extremely difficult to obtain and the application/review process may be the most competitive process known to man. Only the top scientists in the nation apply and only the best proposals (about 8% of applications currently) are funded. The National Institutes of Health has been the most powerful discover machine in human history, hands down! And their influence is multiplied by the fact that all discoveries made by NIH-funded scientists are made generally available to the public for all to use, free of charge. Corporations (pharmaceutical and otherwise) benefit tremendously from this research by using the discoveries of NIH-funded scientists that are in the public domain and attempting to generate “new use patents” based on them (the monetary value in a pharmaceutical product is in a new use patent and that’s what matters to the corps). Research done by corporations often is highly secretive (to keep the competition from gaining advantage), not high quality reliable science, and it is amazingly slow, expensive, and inefficient compared to federally sponsored research. The nation’s best scientists are at the universities and federally supported research institutes. It is also important to realize that companies have great difficulty convincing shareholders to take risks and invest significantly in new domains such as stem cell research or treating low-profit diseases (AIDS, malaria, parasitic infection, rare cancers and other rare diseases, etc). So if you left it to corporations, progress in biomedical research would slow to a creep. I know both of these worlds intimately as an owner of a biotech company, an “opinion leader” in the pharmaceutical development industry, and an NIH-funded adult stem cell researcher myself. I assure you, the best money this country spends is on NIH-funded (federally sponsored) research. Federally sponsored biomedical research is the engine that drives the biomedical industry. It is the goose that is laying the golden eggs and people in the industry know that their success depends on it.
Now a word about stem cell research. Stem cell research is exciting to us for reasons that go beyond their medical applications. Understanding stem cells will be crucial to understanding every molecular step involved in the biology of healthy and diseased cells. Most diseases are, fundamentally, failures of cellular processes at the molecular level. Most, perhaps all, cancers are stem cells gone awry. It seems like a silly waste to discard all of those abandoned frozen cells in fertility clinics when so much could be learned from them instead. The choice is simple - throw them away or learn from them.
admin Says: October 30th, 2006 at 9:36 pm
Dear Nut,
Poppycock! I’m not the one who lacks a clear understanding of the facts, and as usual, you miss the point.
First things first. The vast majority of the NIH’s work is concentrated on early research activities that do not lead to specific medicines. That is the university lab research you’re talking about, right. An NIH study, which you can find at their website, examined 47 top-selling US medicines and determined that four, only four, had been developed in part with technologies created by NIH funding. All the rest were discovered and developed – and funded – by pharmaceutical companies.
Thats the little white lie that liberals like you want to tell. “Vote for a Democrat and Michael J. Fox will get his pills right after the election.” If you are indeed an owner of a biotech firm, an opinion leader in the industry and stem cell researcher, as you claim, then you’ll know that after an NIH funded discovery is “given” to the public for free…a drug company will have to spend about a billion dollars and wait ten to twenty years to bring a usable medicine to the public.
The NIH and ANY GOVERNMENT AGENCY is a distant second to the private sector when it comes to innovation in any area.
The point of my post is this. The Missouri Stem Cell Initiative wants to block any…..any….. state government regulation of stem cell research, including human cloning for the purpose of harvesting embryonic stem cells. If a stem cell research project requires the harvesting of embryonic stem cells, and uses my tax dollars, I’d like to have a say in it. Otherwise, that’s taxation without representation.
I am not against research that can save lives. I am not against research using embryonic stem cells. What I am against is creating a cottage industry of “embryo factories” that create human life for the purpose of destroying it in the name of research. What YOUR industry wants is a blank check with no restrictions on how to spend the money. The Missouri Stem Cell Initiative wants create a constitutional amendment to protect its industry. Thats not about saving lives. That’s about money.
My next post will address the Missouri Stem Cell Issue again for the purpose of exposing the lie Michael J. Fox and nutslikebush want you to buy.
nutslikebush Says: October 30th, 2006 at 11:59 pm
And poppy cock right back at cha, Buck. You completely missed the key points. Notice that I neither said nor implied that NIH manufactured or discovered drugs. Is that your version of the right wing little white lie? I said that the fundamental biological discoveries that serve as the foundations for drug discovery are based on discoveries made at universities and medical schools and are usually federally funded. The fundamental discoveries underlying virtually all of our understanding in the biomedical sciences in the last several decades has emerged either from NIH funded research or research funded by some other government agency. That is a simple fact that I am sure that you will deny - but you’d be wrong. Now you are right that it requires a lot of money to get drugs from the lab bench to the clinic (that is precisely what my business helps pharmaceutical companies do). Usually it doesn’t cost a billion or take 20 years - it’s more like $100 million and 10 years. But you are dead wrong about the relative innovativeness and contributions of industry vs publicly funded scientists, I promise. But you are just spouting the common mythology of the misinformed right. Unfortunately, you terribly underestimate the importance and innovativeness of NIH-funded scientists. I suspect that your ideology has made it impossible for you to evaluate such questions with a clear head.
We may have a long way to go before stem cell research yields benefits to people who suffer from diseases like Parkinson’s. In fact, there is no guarantee that stem cell research will lead to cures for any diseases. We can guarantee that if we don’t do the research, we certainly will not discover cures. We will make new discoveries about the molecular biology of cells and gain new insights into the machinery involved in how nature builds complex organisms from a single cell. Researchers are by nature driven by a passion to solve important problems. You listen to unethical, disgraceful people like the Limbaughs of the world and ridicule truly good people. I find it frustrating that so many are still under the spell of the bad guys.
On your point about creating embyros for research, EVERYONE is against “embryo factories” - especially scientists. That concept was concocted by stem cell research opponents. It is a straw man. Do you know what a straw man is? You must, the right is so bereft of real arguments that it makes up nonsensical ones and attributes them to the left and then does fantasy battles against positions noone holds.
Concerning stem cell ethics, if I understand you, you would be ok with industry carrying out embryonic stem cell research. I know that that is Bush’s position and I have never been able to locate the ethical consistency in that position.
As for taxation without representation, I think that you have misunderstood what that means. Does you state not have 2 senators and a full complement of representatives in congress? If not, you should alert the authorities.