In an editorial for the Weekly Standard, Washington post syndicated columist, Charles Krauthammer brings up some eye opening points about stem cell research. He wrote:
The claim that cloning, and the stem cells it might produce, is on the verge of bringing a cure to your sick father with Alzheimer's or your debilitated mother with Parkinson's is a scandal. It is a cruel deception perpetrated by cynical scientists and ignorant politicians. Its purpose is clear: to exploit the desperation of the sick to garner political support for ethically problematic biotechnology.
The brink? Cloning animals, let alone humans, is so imperfect and difficult that it took 277 attempts before Dolly the sheep was cloned. Scientists estimate that the overall failure rate for cloning farm animals is 95 percent or greater. New experiments with cloned mice have shown gross deformities. And here is the worst part. We have no idea why. We understand little about how reprogrammed genes work. Scientists don't even know how to screen with any test for epigenetic abnormality.
In other words: Even if you could grow embryonic stem cells out of grandma's skin cells, we have no idea yet how to regulate and control these cells in a way to effect a cure. Just growing them in tissue culture is difficult enough. Then you have to tweak them to make precisely the kind of cells grandma needs. Then you have to inject them and hope to God that you don't kill her.
We have already had one such experience, a human stem cell experiment in China. Embryonic stem cells were injected into a suffering Parkinson's patient. The results were horrific. Because we don't yet know how to control stem cells, they grew wildly and developed into one of the most primitive and terrifying cancers, a "teratoma." When finally autopsied -- the cure killed the poor soul -- they found at the brain site of the injection a tumor full of hair, bone and skin.
Scientists, he explained, do not understand quite how stem cells or cloning works, so to rally around this like it's the Second Coming is, he feels, dishonest. He also pointed out that some less than encouraging research was reported in scientific journals but the public was NOT informed of these. One of the most notorious cases of this, he wrote, was:
... the case of the research article on embryonic stem cells published in July in the journal Science, one of the most respected scientific publications in the world. The research showed that embryonic stem cells of mice are genetically unstable. Yes, you can make them grow over and over again, but we don't know how or why some genes are turned on and off. You can make a million copies of a stem cell. They may be genetically identical. But if different genes are turned on in the various cells, the results -- the properties of the tissue or organism they develop into -- can be wildly different.
The researchers of this study originally concluded that because of the instability (unpredictability) observed in mouse stem cells, one might suspect human stem cells to be unstable also, thus casting a pall on the hopes of stem cell research. But according to Charles Krauthammer, a few days before publication, the concluding sentence was withdrawn, in an unusual move, by the researchers who changed their last sentence to a conclusion that the mouse stem cells were not at all relevant to human stem cell research.
Krauthammer concluded:
This change in text represents a corruption of science that mirrors the corruption of language in the congressional debate. It is corrupting because this study might have helped to undermine the extravagant claims made by stem cell advocates that a cure for Parkinson's or spinal cord injury or Alzheimer's is in the laboratory and just around the corner, if only those right-wing, antiabortion nuts would let it go forward.
Unfortunately, this 'corruption in science' is not limited to stem cell research but a troubling reality in medical research as well. For example, in the lawsuit against Phen Fen, a diet medication which was discovered to cause life threatening heart valve destruction in 25 percent of those taking the medication, Wyeth-Ayrest, the manufacturer of the drugs told the court that they did remove some of the negative results of the lab studies from the final reports. Even the scientists who had done the lab studies for Ayrest were surprised at this.
But even more shocking was the fact that Ayrest did not feel they should be penalized for this dishonesty (even though people DIED because of it) because they stated, in COURT, UNDER OATH, that removing negative results of the lab studies from the final reports was a common practice in the pharmaceutical industry. Common practice? Did anyone ever question, why this is allowed when the lives of human beings are at stake?
Charles Krauthammer stated that another promise of stem cell research, the claim that this research will have a cure for Alzsheimers and Parkinson's in FIVE or TEN years, may be equally dishonest to the cover-ups in research.
In reviewing a book on Parkinson's disease, Nina King, associate editor of Washington Post Book World, noted that when she was diagnosed with the disease 15 years ago, she was told that a cure was 5 or 10 years away. She has heard that ever since. A cure in 5 to 10 years "is like a mirage on the horizon, glowing with promise but ever receding."
Five or ten years seems a magic number. Jerry Lewis was collecting money in the 1970's for Muscular Dystrophy with the claim that a cure will be seen in 'five or ten years', yet the Labor Day Telethon this year, will report little else than giving patients wheelchairs and bed pans.
The Multiple Sclerosis Society also promised a cure in "five to ten years" in the 1970's. They did not offer the patient services that MDA offered because, they said they were putting all the money into research in order to get a cure for MS patients soon. Everyone bought it, lock, stock and barrel. I remember one skeptic explaining to me that it was all money and that it actually was not to the benefit of the researchers to find a cure because it would mean the end of their jobs and nice big salaries. I denounced the critic with vehemence. Yet his dour predictions have come to fruition 27 years later. Nothing close to a cure for MS has been seen. The only change is that the MS Society seems to have 'given up', now advocating useless and/or dangerous medications which they eschewed 20 years ago. In exchange, they now publish glitzy magazines paid for by the 'grateful' pharmaceutical companies which produce these drugs. No one seems to notice that MSers are not only not getting better in the long run but perhaps, getting worse, than they were in the days when the MS society advocated only, a regimen of healthy living and limited exercise.
Charles Krauthammer suggests that the worry of some, that 'science will go on' whether the legislators approve or not seems a myth. After a spate of cloning bans, one cloning lab was closed and a cloning conference was poorly attended. Banning, he continued, removes the greatest and best scientists from the research.
Krauthammer brings out troubling thoughts in his editorial. Ever more troubling because he highlights a dishonesty which seems to have taken over the medical field. With this dishonesty comes a seemingly total, disregard for human life and the frightening aspect of this is, did this disregard for adult life come from the fact that our society has no regard for human life in the womb? Some ethicists have pointed out that we cannot disregard human life at any age or the bottom line will be a general disregard for all human life. In studying history, this seems to be true if we look at societies like that of the "Third Reich" which had instituted legalized abortion 20 years before they began to decimate adult life.
Today, in our American society our decimation of adult life is not as crude as what the Nazi's did. Being scientifically oriented, adult life is decimated in clean sanitary hospitals and sterile operating rooms through risky elective surgery and questionable medical treatments.
Examples of this can be seen all around us. Insiders are told by cardiologists that inserting stents is, in MOST CASES, not only much more effective than coronary bypass surgery (and much safer - the heart -lung machine tends to cause brain damage), but also, a year or two after bypass surgeries, most patients will require stents anyway. We've seen this in our Vice President who began to need stents a year after bypass surgery. I know one bypass patient who had surgery 10 years ago. He is kept alive by seven stents! One insider told me, "I've seen people I knew could be helped with stents, get unnecessary bypass surgery and have their quality of life ruined... only to have to have repeat procedures to insert stents a year later to keep them alive." So why is bypass surgery still done in large numbers? A cardiac surgeon can earn $25,000 or more, from each bypass surgery and only $3000 from each stent. Are we saying that the lives of human beings are endangered to maintain the million dollar incomes of the cardiac surgeons? Sure seems suspect! Worse yet, studies on 10,000 people by Dr Dean Ornish show that cardiac disease can be reversed if the patient changes his lifestyle to a low fat diet and daily exercise. REVERSED WITHOUT ANY SURGERY! I personally KNOW a person who was on the 'heart transplant' list. He began an exercise program and a healthy diet and six months later no longer required a transplant. To date, the only medical intervention on him was a pacemaker insert! He is pushing 70 years old.
Another case is the weight loss surgery becoming more popular in our society. Not only is this surgery extremely dangerous but it likely drastically shortens lifespan. Not surprising when one considers the extent of damage done by stapling and cutting off most of the stomach and bypassing the part of the small intestine where stomach acid is neutralized and where most vitamins and nutrients are absorbed. Long term malnutrition seen in patients after these surgeries (which have been done since the 1960's) caused the inventor of the gastric bypass (the most popular surgery today) to abandon his invention in 1980, in favor of a surgery which just stapled the stomach but did not include an intestinal bypass. But the fact that the inventor of the gastric bypass no longer supports the surgery, doesn't deter surgeons of today in any way from selling this surgery like a cotton candy. Worse yet, some sell an even more drastic procedure called the "duodenal switch" which is essentially a variation of the old Jujeunal-Illeal intestinal bypass- the one which caused liver failure in most patients after 10-20 years.
Interestingly enough, surgeons do not promise overweight people long life after surgery but lie to them that they will only live five years WITHOUT surgery. There is NO RESEARCH TO DATE which shows that obesity alone kills and many fat people who have disregarded the dour predictions and said "NO" to the surgery, have long outlived their contemporaries who had Weight Loss Surgery. But fat people, believing in a dream, submit to this dangerous surgery in alarming numbers (45,000 or more procedures will be done this year!) and the image of this surgery shown on the media says nothing of the daily inconveniences of living with a partially broken digestive system nor the dangers of the surgery as far as longevity and health. Worse yet, a sizable portion of those surgically altered, return to extreme obesity within ten years and must face, in addition to the obesity, life threatening complications. If long term patients can be found, most are not really impressed with the surgery. Unfortunately, it's likely that large numbers of long termers have already died from it.
Another example? Stephen Goldstein, MD and OB-GYN and head of the gynecology department at New York University Medical School, in his book, "COULD IT BE... PERIMENOPAUSE" explains that the majority of hysterectomies performed on women are UNNECESSARY and only end up messing up the hormonal balance even more than before. John Lee in his book, WHAT YOUR DOCTOR MAY NOT TELL YOU ABOUT MENOPAUSE, agrees with Goldstein that most hysterectomies are not necessary. Something as simple as Natural Progesterone Cream obtainable in health foods stores, has stopped uterine bleeding in countless women and saved them from the surgeons' scalpels. But doing the small percentage of necessary hysterectomies does not maintain the surgeons' large salaries. So the fact that most women can be easily hormone balanced without pharmaceutical products OR surgery, remains medicine's dirty little secret.
Since most Americans still trust medicine with a blind trust, there continues to be a large number of potential victims, willing to have medicine experiment on them in exchange for the promise of extended life. Unfortunately, this promise seems a myth for most. But the media goes on selling it as the increasing number of dead are swept under the rug. Statistics are skewed daily (for example, deaths from Weight Loss Surgery are often attributed to other causes to make the death rate statistics for Weight Loss Surgery seem less) and the public goes on, suspecting nothing.
It's Machiavellian. If anyone cares.
And so, like other American dreams of slenderness, wealth and eternal youth, the myth of stem cell research is dashed into pieces by one clever columnist. Will it be noticed in the noise of a media eager to sell the product? Unlikely.
Sue Widemark
The Krauthammer article was reprinted in the ProLife
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