“Hot dog: Idiom, a person who performs showy stunts.”
Like our own Gov. Rod Blagojevich, who snuck $10 million past the Illinois General Assembly to fund state-sponsored stem-cell research, including the controversial use of cells from cloned human embryos.
Sure, Blagojevich said taxpayer money wouldn’t go for human cloning, but that’s not what his executive order, announced last week, says. And that wasn’t his only dodge. But, who cares? His news conference got him some national attention, and for Gov. Hot Dog, that’s all that counts, right?
Stem-cell therapy does indeed offer the promise of wonderful cures. Stem cells–broadly speaking, undeveloped human cells grown as replacements for diseased tissue–can be obtained from “adult” stem cells gathered from, say, bone marrow; from immature cells harvested from discarded umbilical cords; and from cloned human embryos. Only the latter raises scary issues about creating or destroying innocent and helpless human life (or beings) for someone else’s needs.
And that’s exactly what Blagojevich’s executive order allows–the use of embryonic stem cells produced by “somatic cell nuclear transfer,” a process the American Medical Association defines as human cloning. Instead of forbidding it, the order expressly provides funding for stem-cell research that is the product of “somatic cell nuclear transfer,” among others.
Sorry for the technicalities (my rant comes later), but we’ve got to deal with them when the facts are so distorted and hopes so unrealistically fueled by Blagojevich’s cynical effort to further his political pipe dreams. For example, his news release says comfortingly that time limits will be set for extracting stems cells from–and thus destroying–the embryos. The executive order says the limit is “initially” eight to 12 days after cell division begins, which starts about 24 hours after fertilization.
Why “initially”? Why a 12-day limit? Why stop there? Why not 24 or 48 days, or longer? Maybe because even embryonic stem-cell proponents understand that after 12 days, the human embryo becomes too, well, human. From day one, the zygote, as the early embryo is called, has its own unique 46 chromosomes. At Day 12, it is producing its own hormones, detectable in the mother’s urine. A day or so later, the beginnings of everything a human being needs, from muscle and blood, to skin and bones, are present. It’s not the finished product, but there’s no doubt what the product is.
Blagojevich’s news release also claims no funding will be awarded to anyone purchasing or selling embryonic or fetal tissue for research purposes, implying that no one will be making any money off this. But his order allows for “reasonable” (whatever that is) payment for the costs of stem cells or stem-cell lines, and seeks to “promote collaboration [with] commercial concerns.” Meaning that someone’s supposed to make money.
His news release paints those of us who oppose embryonic stem-cell therapy as stubbornly refusing “to exhaust every possibility” to find cures–as if something’s wrong with us because we’re chilled when he speaks of “exhausting every possibility” without any deference to ethical concerns.
Worse, Blagojevich ignores a recent warning from the prestigious medical journal Lancet about the “hype” surrounding stem-cell therapy, in the face of real practical and ethical problems. Blagojevich simply has no room for the journal’s caution: “The use of embryos as a source of stem cells creates immediate ethical dilemmas, as does the creation of clones by somatic-cell nuclear transfer.”
P.S.
Indiana University researchers say they have come “several steps closer” to using stem cells to help some deaf persons hear. Not embryonic stem cells, but adult stem cells from the patient’s own bone marrow. Amazingly, cells that normally become fat, bone and cartilage someday might replace the auditory nerve cells missing from the inner ears of some deaf patients.
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I’m one of those patients (complete hearing loss in one ear, partial in the other), so I take it personally when Gov. Hot Dog lines us up like sympathetic props for his moment in the spotlight.
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