Embryonic Stem Cell Research Quotes

The politicized sponsors of this pseudoscientific nonsense should be ashamed to live, let alone die. If you want to take part in the “war” against cancer, and other terrible maladies, too, then join the battle against their lethal stupidity.

This is not (as you have charged) to paint religion with a broad brush. I am very quick to distinguish gradations of bad ideas; some clearly have no consequences at all (or at least not yet); some put civilization itself in peril. The problem with dogmatism, however, is that one can never quite predict how terrible its costs will be. To use one of my favorite examples, consider the Christian dogma that human life begins at the moment of conception: On its face, this belief seems likely to only improve our world. After all, it is the very quintessence of a life-affirming doctrine. Enter embryonic stem-cell research. Suddenly, this “life begins at the moment of conception” business becomes the chief impediment to medical progress. Who would have thought that such an innocuous idea could unnecessarily prolong the agony of tens of millions of people? This is the problem with dogmatism, no matter how seemingly benign: it is unresponsive to reality. Dogmatism is a failure of cognition (as well as a commitment to such failure); it is the state of being closed to new evidence and new arguments. And this frame of mind is rightly despised in every area of culture, on every subject, except where it goes by the name of “religious faith.” In this guise, parading its most grotesque faults as virtues, it is granted a special dispensation, even in the pages of Nature.

I check every can of Barbasol I buy for dinosaur embryos. I haven't found any yet, as evidenced by the lack of T-Rex screams in my apartment.

the U.S. House of Representatives voted effectively to ban embryonic stem-cell research on February 27, 2003.

The tribal differences that erupt into public controversy typically concern sex (e.g., gay marriage, gays in the military, the sex lives of public officials) and death at the margins of life (e.g., abortion, physician-assisted suicide, the use of embryonic stem cells in research). That such issues are moral issues is surely not arbitrary. Sex and death are the gas pedals and brakes of tribal growth. (Gay sex and abortion, for example, are both alternatives to reproduction.)

In the fall of 2006, I participated in a three-day conference at the Salk Institute entitled Beyond Belief: Science, Religion, Reason, and Survival. This event was organized by Roger Bingham and conducted as a town-hall meeting before an audience of invited guests. Speakers included Steven Weinberg, Harold Kroto, Richard Dawkins, and many other scientists and philosophers who have been, and remain, energetic opponents of religious dogmatism and superstition. It was a room full of highly intelligent, scientifically literate people—molecular biologists, anthropologists, physicists, and engineers—and yet, to my amazement, three days were insufficient to force agreement on the simple question of whether there is any conflict at all between religion and science. Imagine a meeting of mountaineers unable to agree about whether their sport ever entails walking uphill, and you will get a sense of how bizarre our deliberations began to seem. While at Salk, I witnessed scientists giving voice to some of the most dishonest religious apologies I have ever heard. It is one thing to be told that the pope is a peerless champion of reason and that his opposition to embryonic stem-cell research is both morally principled and completely uncontaminated by religious dogmatism; it is quite another to be told this by a Stanford physician who sits on the President’s Council on Bioethics. Over the course of the conference, I had the pleasure of hearing that Hitler, Stalin, and Mao were examples of secular reason run amok, that the Islamic doctrines of martyrdom and jihad are not the cause of Islamic terrorism, that people can never be argued out of their beliefs because we live in an irrational world, that science has made no important contributions to our ethical lives (and cannot), and that it is not the job of scientists to undermine ancient mythologies and, thereby, “take away people’s hope”—all from atheist scientists who, while insisting on their own skeptical hardheadedness, were equally adamant that there was something feckless and foolhardy, even indecent, about criticizing religious belief. There were several moments during our panel discussions that brought to mind the final scene of Invasion of the Body Snatchers: people who looked like scientists, had published as scientists, and would soon be returning to their labs, nevertheless gave voice to the alien hiss of religious obscurantism at the slightest prodding. I had previously imagined that the front lines in our culture wars were to be found at the entrance to a megachurch. I now realized that we have considerable work to do in a nearer trench.

The tribal differences that erupt into public controversy typically concern sex (e.g., gay marriage, gays in the military, the sex lives of public officials) and death at the margins of life (e.g., abortion, physician-assisted suicide, the use of embryonic stem cells in research).

There is increasing evidence that at least some of the targeting of epigenetic modifications can be explained by interactions with long ncRNAs. Jeannie Lee and her colleagues have recently investigated long ncRNAs that bind to a complex of proteins. The complex is called PRC2 and it generates repressive modifications on histones. PRC2 contains a number of proteins, and the one that interacts with the long ncRNAs is probably EZH2. The researchers found that the PRC2 complex bound to literally thousands of different long ncRNA molecules in embryonic stem cells from mice13. These long ncRNAs may act as bait. They can stay tethered to the specific region of the genome where they are produced, and then attract repressive enzymes to shut off gene expression. This happens because the repressive enzyme complexes contain proteins like EZH2 that are capable of binding to RNA.

Earlier this month, the Vatican’s top bioethics official condemned as “reprehensible” the assisted suicide of an East Bay woman, Brittany Maynard, who was suffering terminal brain cancer and said she wanted to die with dignity. Francis didn’t refer to the Maynard case specifically. While denouncing euthanasia in general, he also condemned abortion, in vitro fertilization and embryonic stem cell research.

The Catholic Church proclaims that human life is sacred and that the dignity of the human person is the foundation of a moral vision for society. This belief is the foundation of all the principles of our social teaching. In our society, human life is under direct attack from abortion and euthanasia. The value of human life is being threatened by cloning, embryonic stem cell research, and the use of the death penalty. The intentional targeting of civilians in war or terrorist attacks is always wrong. Catholic teaching also calls on us to work to avoid war. Nations must protect the right to life by finding increasingly effective ways to prevent conflicts and resolve them by peaceful means. We believe that every person is precious, that people are more important than things, and that the measure of every institution is whether it threatens or enhances the life and dignity of the human person.

Embryonic stem cells have made a major impact on biomedical research over the past decade or so. Scientists routinely make specific, designed alterations to the genes of mouse ES cells and then inject some of these cells into the inner cell mass of a normal mouse embryo. The mouse that results has a body that is a mixture of normal cells, from the un-manipulated inner cell mass, and the genetically modified cells from the engineered ES cells.

I do have an interest in dissidents. My mother believes 5G may harm us, and I think she’s silly. But what of the nonconformist who warned back in 1940 that cigarettes kill? What of the contrarian who said the CIA was spying on Martin Luther King, Jr.? I mean, I’ve seen no evidence that 5G or the Covid vaccines are harmful. But have I done that research myself? No. I just trust the media would tell me if they were. My media. Whatever media my mom is consuming, they’re quoting “research, studies.” They’re slinging medical articles and YouTube videos of doctors saying that mRNA vaccines kill. A month before our road trip, she sent me one of these videos. It’s a clip of a longer talk, but even the clip is twelve minutes long. “Something to consider,” she wrote in the subject line. “Doctor calls out deadly vaccine!” Twelve minutes is annoyingly long for something I instinctively discredit, but short enough to give it a go. So I do. It’s a doctor on a stage with a PowerPoint. He has studies and graphs and lists of ingredients in tiny fonts and words like “embryonic stem cells.” I write my mom a long response. “OK I’m six minutes in and here are my thoughts: he’s using a lot of technical science speak that is above my pay grade. And so, what I’m doing is I’m trusting the lingo of an expert.

Science alone cannot justify the pro-life position, thought it can give us the facts we need to draw moral conclusions on a host of controversial issues, including abortion, embryonic stem cell research, and cloning.

The properties of the renewal tissues enabled the original definition of stem cell behaviour in terms of the ability to self-renew and to generate differentiated progeny. But the most famous stem cell of them all is now the embryonic stem cell (ES cell). In one sense, the ES cell is the iconic stem cell. It is the type of stem cell that has attracted all of the ethical controversy, and it is what lay people are thinking of when they refer to ‘stem cell research’. But ironically, the embryonic stem cell does not exist in nature. It is a creature that has been created by mankind and exists only in the world of tissue culture: the growth of cells in flasks in the laboratory, kept in temperature-controlled incubators, exposed to controlled concentrations of oxygen and carbon dioxide, and nourished by complex artificial media. Cells grown in culture are often referred to by the Latin phrase in vitro (in glass, since the relevant containers used to be made of glass) and distinguished from in vivo (inside the living body).

After years of painstaking research, in 2006 Yamanaka and his team discovered that proteins encoded by just four “master genes” could turn back the clock and transform any adult cell back into a stem cell. Just as a stem cell could differentiate itself forward in developmental time into a skin, blood, liver, heart, or any other of the two hundred types of human cells, these Yamanaka factors could revert any skin, blood, liver, or other type of cell back into the equivalent of an embryonic stem cell.