A Good Week For Stem Cell Research?

So Says Bill Saunders of TheFactIs.org. Among his observations from his current opinion analysis:

Now, what's the good news from last week? Well, it really came in bunches. First, the House of Representatives passed a bill for increased funding for umbilical cord-stem cell research. This, as noted, is an ethical type of stem cell research. Congress should be funding ethical stem cell research. After all, there are serious diseases and disabilities for which many scientists believe stem cells can provide treatments or cures. And there has already been lots of research with umbilical cord blood stem cells – unlike with embryonic stem cells – showing promise in human treatments, and does so on a time-line that is decades in advance of anything that can be envisioned with embryonic stem cells.

He consisely observes the Foolishly obvious: non-embryonic stem-cell research kills no one and offers greater opportunity to heal everyone. He also hints at why the Reasonable have such a love affair with embryonic stem-cell research, even though it kills and has yet to meet its extravagent promises:

For those who don't know, in in vitro fertilization clinics (IVF), thousands of embryonic human beings are maintained in the deep freeze. These embryonic human beings are the "spares" left over from IVF procedures, which, routinely in the USA but not in other countries, result in the creation of many more human embryos that can be safely implanted at one time in the woman. These "spares" are frozen. The existence of these frozen human embryos has sparked dreams of greed and glory for many scientific entrepreneurs, who want to use these human beings as sources for stem cells. (emphasis mine)

Certainly money is a motivation. The other is more simple and insidious. It's the apple. You know, the one that Eve ate. That temptation to become like God. That root sin, the one for which Christ truly died on the Cross in order to heal us. Somehow, the Reasonable among us have relapsed. Seriously.

Autonomy is the name of the game. Determine right for ourselves, and all that. Protect our "liberty" from those theocratic right-wingers. Now, for most ordinary folk with enough of the Fool in them, uttering such inanity will lead to rolled eyes and lost elections, as November 2004 proved. So the Reasonable know they need to camaflage this agenda.

What better cover could there be than the promise of "cures" for sick children? So they utter, over and over: "Come on! Are you really going to not slice open a bunch of cells, when there are sick children that need medicine? There frozen; they won't live anyways. What are you going to accomplish?"

Fortunately, the truth is on the Fools' side. All we have to do is keep laughing it out loud as often as the Reasonable stammer on about so-called cures. Ultimately, the research that yields the successful treatment will attract the venture capitalists anyways. Since non-embryonic stem-cell research is closer to this outcome than Reasonable embryonic stem-cell research, there's hope.