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Politics : A US National Health Care System? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Brumar89 who wrote (7618)	7/18/2009 1:47:28 PM
From: Brumar89	Respond to of 42652

Putting Science in Its Proper Place Again That is to say, in the hands of powerful lobbies. From the NY Post: MEDICAL-RESEARCH insiders know that embryonic-stem-cell technology is proving a dead end — Dr. Bernadine Healy, a former director of the National Institutes of Health and once an ES-cell-research enthusiast, calls it “obsolete.” But the Obama administration has opened wide the federal funding floodgates — the triumph of a big special-interest PR and lobbying campaign. In fact, the research will line the pockets of a relatively few individuals — at considerable cost for the rest of us, since the funding means billions that won’t go to more promising areas. … Basically, the lobby for ES-cell research succeeded in shutting down critics (or even questions) by presenting the question as “medical progress versus pro-life politics” (as one Newsweek cover put it). The media, observes the Genetics & Society Center, consistently squeeze all reporting into a prefab story line of “scientists hoping to save lives versus opponents of abortion rights who see destroying stem cells as equivalent to taking a life.” And it’s a very wealthy lobby. Research funding can generate tremendous income with no treatments, because human and animal ES cells, and materials and techniques used to manipulate them, can all be patented. Licensing fees make them worth a fortune. Needless to say, if you donate your own skin or fat cells to be manipulated into an effective treatment, there’s no patent there, and where’s the fun in that? In Obamaland, although it IS important to keep Big Lobbies happy, it’s even more important to prevent those obnoxious, sanctimonious, godbothering Jesus-freaks from ever being right. The science is settled, you know. And Science Says that religious people are always wrong, especially when they’re not. Posted by dicentra proteinwisdom.com