Let us debunk a myth or two here: Scientists are not cruising the city streets in blacked out vans looking to abduct pregnant women, forcibly abort their babies and steal the cells in the fetus. There is no farm in Romania with hundreds of pregnant women lined up to have their fetuses harvested for money. There is no Island of Doctor Moreau where crazed scientists are creating humans that lactate tomato juice mixed with vodka and can zap death rays out of their eyes.
That is the Great Fear that Dubya has just saved America from by vetoing a House bill expanding embryonic stem cell research.
Stem cells are the undifferentiated blobs in an embryo that will eventually become bones, skin, eyelids, arseholes, twats and Presidents. At that very, very initial point of cell division, between 50 and 150 cells, the cells have no idea what they’re going to become: They are raw cellular material.
By tweaking the genetic and chemical controls, you can, so the theory goes, turn them into nerves, or pancreas cells, or bone marrow, or brain cells. Those who research human conditions, like spinal cord injuries, or brain injuries, work with human cells. You can’t use plant or animal embryo cells on humans. You need human cells to plug into humans. The source of these human cells has most often been the microscopic blobs that result from in-vitro fertilization (IVF) of human eggs.
Here’s the general mechanics of IVF. Doctors harvest a couple of dozen eggs from the woman, by stimulating the ovaries to super-ovulate, meaning produce a lot of eggs, rather than one at a time, as is the nominal 28-day human ovulation cycle. The eggs are collected by basically, washing the fallopian tubes and uterus with saline and filtering the stuff that washes back out. The eggs are put in a lab dish under a microscope and sorted. Some will be fine, ripe and ready for dancing. A few will be odd, dead or generally off. These are sorted out and sold as Human Caviar to the extremely wealthy. This is just a rumor, of course.
The man who is going to be the donor of the male genetic material, goes into the restroom with a copy of Penthouse. He whacks off into a test tube and hands the gooey goods over to a lab tech. The tech takes the ejaculate and centrifuges away the semen, leaving just the sperm. Take a pipette and mix the shiny fresh eggs and nice squeaky clean sperm together. Don’t hiccup using the pipette. Let them roll around for an hour or two in a lab dish. Back under the microscope and you’ll see several eggs and sperm have joined up and started cell division. Siphon off the three or four most promising-looking and squirt them into the female’s uterus, where hopefully, one or two will attach to the uterine lining, thrive and 40 weeks later become a human infant.
There are often leftovers in the dish. These might be dropped down the sink, or frozen and saved for future use by the couple. Some are donated to science for stem cell research.
In the Big Shiny World of the Future, the lab coats would take these cells and through some wondrous science, grow new nerves that could be implanted in a paralyzed trucker and presto-chango: They get up and walk to the 7-11 for a Big Gulp Mountain Dew Code Red. We could cure Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, Diabetes, Cystic Fibrosis, Heart failure, Crow’s Feet and Saggy Tits in an afternoon. The problem is that nobody knows for certain that it will work. It is a SWAG, a Scientific Wild-Ass Guess.
Not in Dubya’s world. The science is a done deal, just waiting on fresh white fetuses. He’s saving the unborn. In Dubya’s World, these are fully developed humans that could vote if only the menacing hordes of traveling abortionists could be stopped by legislation. It plays great with the religious right wing determined to insert their meddling fingers into things they don’t understand and can’t appreciate. It is fear-mongering for votes.
A working, effective, stem cell based treatment is probably a generation away. There are too many unanswered questions in the science to be answered. Let’s say we can grow spinal nerves for our paralyzed trucker. How do we insert them? How long until the nerves start working? Will the body reject them as foreign objects? How long will the rehab be until the patient gets up and goes to the 7-11? We do not have the data to even make educated guesses.
The same holds true for the cure for Parkinson’s. We don’t know 1/12th of 1 percent of what we think we know about the brain. Ask a neurologist or a pharmacist to explain how Aspirin works in the brain. They can’t tell you, because they don’t know, except to say, it works and has worked since 1899. We’re not even at the point of saying we might be able to grow one neuron cell to replace the billions of neurons that make one neural junction in one tiny area of the brain that might have something to do with Parkinson’s. We do not know.
The bioethics are another matter. I figure let the lab coats work with the best material they can get their hands on, if only to see if they can make it work. I believe this for one simple reason: I am a Type II diabetic. If they can come up with a treatment, preferably a pill, (I’ll settle for a suppository) that will cure my diabetes then I’m all for it.
Just remember that the opponents of human embryonic stem cell research are against it for religious grounds, not scientific grounds and the science is at best, a long shot.
RoadDave 