‘Lines that Divide’

By Chuck Colson:

Scientists at Children’s Hospital in Oakland, California, are discovering a potential cure for leukemia and sickle-cell disease. How? By using blood stem cells from the placentas of women who have had Caesarian deliveries.

But researchers at the hospital are frustrated. State agencies have made multi-million-dollar grants available for embryo-destructive research, but money is scarce for its ethically sound counterpart, adult stem cell research.

In the Contra Costa Times, lead Children’s Hospital researcher Frans Kuypers says, “No one has been cured by an embryonic stem cell. We are able to cure folks with [adult] stem cells.”

So why isn’t adult stem cell research receiving more funding? Josephine Quintavalle, director of Comment on Reproductive Ethics, says “What you get from [the adult stem cell] approach is a patient-specific cure. There’s no middleman . . . and there’s no drug company that’s going to get rich as a result of it.”

But, she explains, a lot of the pressure for stem-cell research is to find products that they can sell, as opposed to a treatment they can do to cure you.
[...]

You just have to wonder how these people sleep at night.

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