Stem Cells are many times the product of aborted foetuses. The first
few paragraphs below are by bob geiger and his article at alternet is
nothing but a rant basically stating that anyone not in possession of
a degree is stupid.   He and his cloistered and complacent bunch were not even competent to observe ENMOD, and most of them are still not!  7 years + they have been sprayed upon daily and subjected to psychotronic mind control, and have gone merrily about their "Learning".  Oh well.  I include the
paragraph from bobs article because it states the situation in the
senate right now, as of today.

 The article below bobs paragraph, by Michael Cook, is much more
objective and informative, from Australia, and it addresses many of
the same issues that we are to deal with here in the USA.  The thing about all
this is:  bush and many of his type are invested to the teeth in
biotech, enmod, and stem cell research, etc., they are the mad
scientists of this generation.  I do not envy them their love of lucre
because that always makes it difficult to do the right thing, especially when they espouse the right thing, while acting 180 degrees out of phase with it!

It will be interesting to see what the GOP does with this hot potato.  The
other side of the federal reserve foreign powers in our government,
the democrats, at least can be honest about THIS, and doncha know they
are using it to the max.

This is being stepped on HARD by the press, I saw it on Google which
was advertising it at wired news, then went to wired it was REMOVED!
I went and posted at a place where some guys were giving me hell, I
think they are DHS, out of work and now paid to run boards for their
boy george....I just got all my posts and my membership banned at a
politics board for mentioning it!   Oh well.

b
------------------------------
Posted by Bob Geiger at 6:41 AM on July 10, 2006.

 After going zero for three in "Wedge-Issue June," Senate Majority
Leader Bill Frist (R-TN) must have decided that it would look good on
his resume to actually get some meaningful legislation passed in the
109th Congress. This forced Frist before the July 4 recess to agree to
a deal with Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) that will on Monday
(Today-ed.) start a week of debating and voting on stem cell research
in the form of three bills now before the Senate.
----------------------------
STEM CELL RESEARCH

By Michael Cook
July 11, 2006

Two things blaze out with noonday clarity about embryos and their stem
cells: scientists appear to know almost everything, and the rest of us
fear we know almost nothing. In fact, since stem cell biology is such
a fast-moving field, all Australians - even other scientists - depend
completely on what we are fed by a few dozen stem cell specialists.

Radical changes to laws on reproductive technology, such as whether to
authorise therapeutic cloning, could emerge from this week's meeting
of the Council of Australian Governments meeting.

The proposal by those who want to liberalise the law is that
researchers should be allowed to create embryos, grow them for 14
days, and extract stem cells, thus killing the embryo.

In view of the tremendous financial potential of stem cell products
and the legal and ethical consequences of changing the status quo, any
proposed changes have to be scrutinised thoroughly. As Princeton
University president Shirley Tilghman has commented, "Some of the
public pronouncements in the field of stem cell research come close to
over-promising at best and delusional fantasising at worst."

The Australian public - which would end up bankrolling this
controversial research - must be protected from huckstering. Here are
a few of the many questions that scientists should face about their
work:

- Progress towards therapeutic cloning requires women's eggs, probably
in vast numbers, yet donors are not supposed to be compensated.
Retrieving the eggs is a long, uncomfortable and potentially dangerous
procedure and it is unlikely that many women will volunteer. How,
then, will you source the eggs? In particular, do you plan to use
rabbit or cow eggs to create beings that are mostly human, but part
animal? Why hasn't any other country authorised this radical
procedure?

- Apart from their use as therapies, cloned embryos are said to be
needed for their insight into chronic genetic diseases, such as
Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, diabetes and muscular dystrophy. But isn't
it true that the emergence of these diseases during embryonic
development is only a hypothesis, not a certainty? In that case, would
you ask permission to grow embryos for longer than 14 days? How much
longer? As far as the end of the first trimester?

- If you are successful in developing a personal body repair kit using
the technique of therapeutic cloning, how much will this cure cost? US
scientists estimate it could be at least $A135,000. Would that be true
in Australia as well?

- The world's most famous cloner, Ian Wilmut, the scientist who cloned
Dolly the sheep, released a book last week in which he suggests that
therapeutic cloning should be used to create healthy designer babies.
Is this an outcome you would welcome?

- Cloning babies is the single possibility of reproductive technology
to which the public is adamantly opposed. Yet the Australian Academy
of Science, along with more than 60 of the world's leading science
academies, is a signatory to a declaration that a ban on human
reproductive cloning "should be reviewed periodically in the light of
scientific and social developments".

And last month the world's most prominent IVF body, the European
Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology, was only willing to
extend its moratorium on reproductive cloning for a single year. If
human reproductive cloning were safe, would it be ethical?

Korea's Hwang debacle, in which the world's most successful stem cell
scientist has been disgraced as a scientific fraud and put on trial
for embezzlement, shows a potential conflict of interest in embryo
research regulation.

On the one hand, scientists are both the gatekeepers for all of the
government's information and the recipients of the government's
funding. On the other hand, their work might be a bonanza for the
government. In the light of this, is the Lockhart report vigilant
enough? It proposes to leave embryo research in the hands of a
licensing committee that could approve innovative procedures without
consulting anyone.

Whenever I am compelled to play croquet, I cheat like blazes. I cannot
see why I should abide by the rules of a patently absurd game.
Embryonic stem cell researchers must feel a bit like that. For them
the human embryo is nothing more than a clump of cells. Why, then,
must they kowtow to the public and Parliament for permission? So their
storyline changes with every telling. The pole star shifts from
helping infertile couples, to curing Alzheimer's, to seeking the
origin of chronic diseases, to drug testing, depending on who is
listening. The beneficiaries, they say, will be healthy patients, or a
booming biotech industry, or blue-sky science.   story it takes
to get the laws and the funding they need.

Fair enough. It's a free country. But to prove their case they have to
present, not a jerry-built castle of half-truths and high hopes, but
the whole truth and a transparent agenda. Nothing less is good enough
to warrant a change in the law.

Michael Cook is editor of the bioethics newsletter BioEdge.