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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Hope Praytochange who wrote (683187)	5/23/2005 4:54:07 PM
From: Peter Dierks	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769670

You use the Seattle Times for that too? What a coincidence. They print stuff on it so you can tell if you have wrapped straight. Fish are notoriously not rounded.

To: Hope Praytochange who wrote (683187)	5/23/2005 5:17:23 PM
From: Kenneth E. Phillipps	Respond to of 769670

Stem-cell semantics: Are people being killed in the search for future cures? On one hand, you've got President Bush vowing to veto a bill to allow more federally funded stem-cell research because he's against "science which destroys life in order to save a life." On the other hand, you have researcher Woo Suk Hwang saying that the new embryonic stem-cell lines he and his collaborators isolated didn't really come from human embryos, but from "nuclear transfer constructs." There are plenty of loaded words in the stem-cell debate: Are researchers "cloning humans" or engaged in "nuclear transfer"? There's no question that embryonic stem cells are taken from a speck of living tissue, but is that speck a collection of processed human cells or a self-contained individual? The answers to such questions will lay the groundwork for either going forward or holding back on the embryonic stem-cell frontier, at least in the United States. And it's essential that researchers, policy-makers and the public arrive at clear answers, said Francis Collins, the director of yet another effort on the biomedical frontier, the National Human Genome Research Institute. Collins declined to address the stem-cell debate directly during a news briefing at a Seattle genetics forum today, saying it wasn't his department. But he did say "we have really fouled up in terms of the terminology that's associated with these discussions." He noted that the stem cells in Hwang's research, published by the journal Science this week, were developed by transferring nuclear material from skin cells to egg cells. That's "a very different circumstance" from the more common scenario, in which skin cells are extracted from leftover frozen embryos, he said. "And yet, in our terminology, we use 'embryo' freely to describe all these circumstances, and I think it confuses our own scientific discussion, and I'm sure it confuses the public," Collins said. "I think you could make the case, from a moral and theological perspective, that there's a rather different context here in terms of those two entities, one of which came from the skin cell of an adult person, and one which was a sperm-and-egg fusion." If you take that perspective, you might regard the technique used by Hwang and his colleagues as more acceptable than using leftover in-vitro fertilization embryos. You might also contend that the "nuclear transfer constructs" should not be considered new human individuals. But couldn't the "constructs" become humans if they were implanted in wombs? In their study, Hwang and his colleagues argue that they could not: They say the conditions under which the cells are processed may predispose them "for cell culture proliferation, with negligible potentials for implantation and none for normal development." The study does not "provide any encouragement for dangerous human reproductive cloning attempts," the researchers say. That argument is not going to sway the critics of embryonic stem-cell research. In fact, to many of those critics, the technique used by Hwang's group is more horrid than using leftover frozen embryos, because they see it as creating new human life with the intention of destroying it. You can expect stem-cell semantics to evolve as the debate widens: If the scientists have their way, the term "therapeutic cloning" will be replaced by "somatic-cell nuclear transfer." And I'm betting that someone will find a substitute for the word "embryonic" in the term "embryonic stem cells." (In the Science paper, Hwang and his colleagues refer to NT-blastocysts and NT-embryos, with "NT" standing for nuclear transfer.) msnbc.msn.com