Tzor, you don't understand biology. You are linking to people who don't understand biology and reading articles by people who don't understand biology.
To say that a patient has been helped by adult stem cells but was not helped by embryonic stem cell research is
insane. That is a total non sequitur. Embryonic stem cell research is
research. It's the thing that lets us make adult stem cells. Without embryonic stem cell research, there are no adult stem cells. At all.
This is exactly like claiming that not a single patient has been cured by testing drugs on lab rats. It may be true or false depending on how you look at it, but it's a completely retarded and vacuous claim that completely disregards where medical treatments come from and how evidence based medicine works.
The point of stem cell research, the
entire point is to make adult stem cells. No one is ever going to take cells from random fetal tissue and inject it into anyone. Because that would be pointless. The promise of stem cells is that it can make tissues and organs that are genetically matched to the proposed host. The creation of self-grafts that can function in the body without fear of rejection. And you are never going to get that sort of tissue matching from a random embryo and no one in the medical community is saying that you will.
But we
are saying that in order to make that magic happen, we need a more exhaustive understanding of the internal and external chemical environment of a cell when it decides to diversify into a liver or a kidney. Add guess what?
That requires us to tear apart cells that are actually doing that. Over and over again. At every stage of development. In a wide variety of scenarios. Until we can make a really accurate map of how this works, we won't be able to do better than the really simple stem cell systems we have up and running right now. And the ones we
do have working? Those are based on the embryonic research we already did.
Now you might be wondering how it is that we've ripped open a lot of frog eggs and even a lot of human blastocysts and we still can't reliably make your skin cells revert to pluripotent stem cells and turn into neural tissue. Well... that's because stem cell differentiation turns out to be really complicated. Here is part of the signalling information involving
one incredibly important signalling molecule called "Sonic Hedgehog" (yes, really):
Sonic Hedgehog wrote:Hedgehog (HH) proteins signal by binding to the transmembrane proteins Interference hedgehog (IHOG) and Brother of IHOG (BOI), which facilitates the interaction of HH with the multipass transmembrane protein Patched (PTC). This interaction relieves the repressive effect of PTC on the serpentine protein Smoothened (SMO). Like PTC, SMO is an obligate component of the HH pathway, being required for all aspects of HH signal transduction that have so far been described. In Drosophila melanogaster, SMO becomes hyperphosphorylated in response to HH signalling and accumulates in the plasma membrane, whereas in vertebrate cells, the protein localizes to primary cilia following exposure to HH ligands. Once activated, SMO modulates the activities of members of the Glioma-associated oncogene homologue (GLI) transcription-factor family. In D. melanogaster, there is just one GLI-family protein, named Cubitus interruptus (CI), which is crucial for HH signalling. CI is a bifunctional transcription factor with both repressor and activator domains that flank a central DNA-binding zinc-finger domain. In the absence of HH signalling, CI undergoes proteolytic cleavage, which is primed by its phosphorylation by three kinases, Protein kinase A (PKA), Glycogen synthase kinase 3 (GSK3) and Casein kinase 1 (CK1), and mediated by the ubiquitin ligase pathway; this yields a truncated form of the protein that acts exclusively as a repressor of HH target-gene transcription (CIR). Activation of SMO suppresses CI cleavage and promotes the nuclear import of a full-length CI protein (CIA); the resulting depletion of the truncated form of CI relieves the repression of some HH target genes, and the full-length CI protein further enhances their transcription. CI is present in a complex with the COS2 scaffold protein, which recruits PKA, GSK3 and CK1, facilitating phosphorylation of CI on residues that are crucial for its cleavage. COS2 binds directly to the intracellular C-terminal tail of SMO, thereby providing a physical basis for the regulatory interaction between SMO and CI. Exactly how SMO activation abrogates CI processing is unclear, but one clue comes from the dependence of SMO activation on its hyperphosphorylation. Notably, the phosphorylation sites that are essential for SMO activity resemble those that are phosphorylated by PKA, GSK3 and CK1 in CI, leading to the suggestion that the phosphorylated C-terminal tail of SMO might compete with CI for a binding partner that mediates its cleavage. CI also interacts with the Fused (FU) serine threonine kinase that abrogates its sequestration in the cytoplasm by the Suppressor of fused (SU(FU)) protein. A negative-feedback loop is initiated when the BTB/rdx proteins, targets of HH signalling, degrade CI.
OK? Now, I cut that short. Because you don't understand it, and I bet you didn't even read all of it. But it gets the point across I think. This shit is complex as fuck, and we need a lot of
data before we can make it do anything.
So when you come out and say that the
research isn't helping anyone and the
results of that research are... you aren't proving the point you think you are. What you're really proving is that you don't have clue one as to what the issues at hand actually are and are in no way qualified to say anything to anyone about what the best ways to proceed are. Furthermore, you're proving without the slightest shadow of a doubt that the advocacy groups you speak for and listen to are
unqualified to craft policy or even talking points on this subject. Which in turn calls into question their authority on every other subject from economics to morality.
The harsh reality is that you don't know what you're talking about and you keep talking anyway. And that you are speaking on behalf of an entire religious ideology that collectively does not know what it is talking about. That you and everyone like you lives in the demon haunted world and your pronouncements about what is good or bad or dangerous or safe are based on
abject ignorance and are not to be heeded by anyone ever on this or any other subject.
Are we done here?
-Username17
