It amazes me that in this time of innovation and technology there are some who refuse to fund potentially life-saving research simply based on their own personal beliefs. Instead of making progress towards curing Parkinsons, diabetes, etc., we have wasted years and billions trying to engineer cells that should instead be harvested with little effort.

I agree.

Secondly, it proves the continuing struggle of modern day technology and religion. It's sad that in 2011 religion can hamper and delay such advancements based on medievil thinking and fear.

Simple fix, anyone who objects to cures and treaments found via cellular research and develpoment........feel free to not partake in any. But don't interfere with my rights to.

Why are all these religious nuts allowed to impose their fantasies/beliefs on me? I am an American, I am supposed to be free of these mythologies.

There are two dietary suplements on the market that cause a large increase of your own Adult Stem Cells into circulation.

Stop the name calling. There are hundreds of millions of people who have closely held religious beliefs to which they adhere. They doesn't make them radical or nuts. If you have a solution, let's hear it. But stop bashing everyone in sight simply because you disagree.

And religion does it again. Please just stay in you're homes and wait for the rapture and leave the thinking to the people that can.

Research guidelines for theraputic cloning, or better described as embryonic stem cell replication, I believe could be set up without crossing ethical boundries if people understood exactly what takes place. An unfertilized egg, females pass one each month, is used in this process. Sperm and egg never meet, fertilization does not occur, hence no life at conception argument. The nucleus from the egg is removed and replaced with the nucleus from a cell from the person needing the stem cells. Once stimulated to start divinding and replicating cells the process goes for 5 days and is stopped at which time the stem cells are collected. Those cells can then be coaxed into kidney, liver, nerve etc. which ever the patient needs.

Where was life created or destroyed in this process? There are two main advantages to this; one since it is the patients DNA in the nucleus there will not be the rejection problem, two the stem cells react as embryotic stem cells with much more possibilities than adult stem cells.

Guidelines could be written specifically prohibiting this process from being used to clone a human and limited only for embryotic stem cell replication. If someone needs a kidney or liver etc. it would make no sense to clone a person and then wait another 13 plus years for them to reach adulthood to harvest the organ. Stem cell replication produces the desired organ or cells in weeks to months, not years.

i am a researcher and most people have no idea what goes into finding a new medication or so help us a cure for a disease. Stem cell research has immense potential but not in a coupe of years. Please get worked up over all the kids that are already here and are neglected, abused, beaten, molested and starving and stop getting upset over a clump of cells you couldn’t recognize as human if they bit you on the ass. Just let us do our job.

So, phillip-2395190, you say "Isn't it better to improve the lives of the living instead of making new lives that will need assistance to be kept alive?" You mean that people who would potentially need assistance don't deserve to live? I am sure that a treatment with stem cells would not come cheap and would certainly require a lot of heavy technology (I do medical research myself, so I know a little what I'm talking about). That would definitely qualify as "assistance to be kept alive", wright? Which means that, per your logic, people who would need stem cell therapy should not receive it. That is if they are from Guatemala. Of course, rich people from the US would be a completely different story. These are the real, worthy human beings, who deserve more than one shot at life. Because power and wealth is what makes a life really worthy, wright?

Create stem cells from unused embryos. what possible ethical problems are there? we kill men women and children is wars, uprisings, occupations, etc. we starve people to death, we poison them to death so what.

I support choice for women, i support marriage for all, i support stem cell research.

freedom for all LOL.

Born ... didn't you know that the United States of America was founded as a fundamentalist Christian country? What that is exactly what Jefferson and Franklin and all those guys said ... it is right there in the Bible next to the part about the rapture and people riding dinosaurs on saddles! ... hmmmm *thumbing through* now I know it is on here somewhere ....  Genesis? ... nope .. Matthew ... Paul (evil fag he was) ... dang .... I am sure it is in here .... everyone says so ... I will have to get back to you on chapter and verse ...

First, liberals want people with mansions around the world, multiple private jets, 100+ foot yachts, etc, to make small sacrifices to help people, and now they want to use discarded, surplus 100-cell blastocysts donated by fertility clinic couples to help the sick. The liberals' affront to morality knows no bounds!

Religious wankers can't have it both ways: first saying government has no business legislating their churches and what goes on in them, but then saying government must ban abortion and stem cell research.

It's time to tax the churches. Big time.

It's funny how you so called thinking people can rip on the religious nuts but can't seem to read the results that adult stem cells have had compared to embryonic. Embryonic has 0. Now maybe you so called smart people can sit in your homes and let the results stand for themselves.

Why do the conservatives come off so embarrassingly silly when it comes to stem cell research? Their posts on this thread read like something from Mad Magazine or a dimwitted cartoon caption.

I'm not normally a grammar nazi but did anyone else find this article just terrible?

Even one good reread or an editor should have found these problems. MSNBC should have a rating method so we can rate this kind of grammar garbage down and give writers an incentive to have at least SOME quality control.

Spell check isn't enough. Or as the article would probably say "Spell check aren't enough"

Why do you have to blame God ,yes it`s true he made us,but with flaws like when we think we made him.but one day like it or not all knee`s shall bow

There is already a NATURAL supplement available here and in 15 countries that triggers YOUR OWN stem cells to multiply by the millions and heal your body itself the way nature intended. It does not use any controversial embryonic stem cells. It was leagally brought to production by an independent company. The drug companies and medical field dont encourage natural healing because it competes with the drug companies and medical research funding.This supplement was brought to market 6 years ago and is available today. Thousands of people are already seeing AMAZING results. Look up StemTech International for more information. (ID#5919030)

Looks like there might be a bit more to "noncoding DNA" and all the other tiny bits than the proponents of somatic cell nuclear transfer cloning prefer everyone to believe . . .

No doubt, there are safe and logical ways to manipulate fundamental genetic algorithms, but a lot more research needs to be done to discover how to do it, really . . .

Really!

1633: The Catholic church orders Galileo to stand trial on heresy. The condemnation: “[Galileo’s] proposition that the sun is in the center of the world and immovable from its place is absurd, philosophically false, and formally heretical; because it is expressly contrary to Holy Scriptures.” Psalm 93:1, Psalm 96:10, and 1 Chronicles 16:30 include text stating that “the world is firmly established, it cannot be moved.” In the same tradition, Psalm 104:5 says, “the LORD set the earth on its foundations; it can never be moved.” Further, Ecclesiastes 1:5 states that “And the sun rises and sets and returns to its place, etc.”

2011: The church condemns stem cell research. The condemnation: “That life-saving cures for devastating diseases may be found from stem cells is absurd, philosophically false, and is contrary to the Holy Scriptures.”

Perhaps it will take a few hundred more years with even more examples of dispelling such false religious dogmas before the masses realize that the rhetoric against stem cell research is based upon yet another false religious dogma. Do you think the religious leaders will regret the many who suffered and died with diseases which could have been cured had they not stifled earlier stem cell research?

So please explain why this discovery "could dash hopes for alternative to embryonic cells"? Don't embryonic cells elicit exactly the same immune response considering they are from a genetically distint source?

Worst case these stem cells are at least as good as fetal stem cells and cause the same immune reaction fetal cells do. Why does that dash the hopes for an alternative?

So what's up with all the hostility here? This alternative is at least as good as fetal cells and with further research there might be (and probably is) a way around this limitation which there probably isn't for fetal cells.

Rather odd all this muck and smear against religious belief, when in fact the findings above had nothing to do with religion per se, but rather what at first looked like an innovative way to produce lab versions of stem cells. This would've been a good idea even IF the embryonic version of stem cells showed more promise--and they don't. Adult stem cells for over a decade now have been doing 100% of the heavy lifting in medical research into about 80+ treatments and growing almost monthly. Adult stems cells--the non-controversial ones that do NOT involve popping living embryos for harvest from bummed out in-vitro attempts and other leftovers, have all the potentiality claimed for the true flop in all this--the ESCs. And yet the issue somehow always gets pointed back to religion. Highly irrational. The ASC version is the one that actually works--the 64 bit computer in this store compared to the old ENIAC clunker, by comparison, and yet we see here yet more dreck against those who have valid ethical concerns that hold that embryos not be treated the same as cheek cells.

Please, people. Do your homework before using medical research as a way to smear people and find more revenue for the idiots in government via taxation on churches, et al. It really IS unbecoming.

I would highly suggest here for starters:

 I would also like to point out that to all those detractors of ethical inputs/concerns regarding ESC research, and who say "just give us enough time and federal money" (contrary to popular belief, though, private funding is NOT banned, nor the funding of states or the feds anymore) "and all will be just dandy.":

Be careful. Just because you've noted that in the natural background, billions of human embryos no doubt perish from various causes, is NOT in itself reason to add to the loss by being obnoxious about the matter in the lab. I understand the hesitance of some to acknowledge that embryos are "human" in the standard definition, as the realm is mostly invisible to most people other than researchers. However, adding on to this--piling on--is probably not the proximate answer to the problem by just such hand-waving away the ethical concerns. The issue is not quite that simple for a number of reasons.

Here's just one:

In nature, the auto-destruct of embryos in-utero is primarily due to nutritional, disease, and genetic anomolies that are NOT sought in ESC research. Indeed, in order to study a baseline of potentialities, you NEED HEALTHY ESCs to study--not the fouled ones that "die anyhow."   To forge ahead in the human realm for example would be to take a peek at the sour stats from some societies--our own included--and conclude that since wife-beating, child abuse, bullying in schools, or bad teeth are unfortunately quite common and no easy remedies are available, therefore it's OK to beat, abuse, bully, and knock remaining teeth out of people's heads due to the fact that these shenanigans "go on anyhow."  I think we all know better than to glom onto such notions, right?

Likewise with the very early stages of human life, even IF some don't readily acknowledge the potentiality of the "humanness" of the embryo itself.

I understand that part, of course, but the issue is not so simple as saying "golly gee wilkers, billions die naturally!" 

And so they do--and so do full-blown adult humans from a wide variety of causes. But note that murder is still neither legal nor moral. Dig?

We don't need to go down this road to such a cavalier culture. Bad tidings await such, even if finding temporary "miracle cures" for this and that ailment so we can all wind down the clock playing golf at age 145 on some resort.

Also--the immune response from distant tissue IS probably going to REMAIN a very large problem for now--yet another reason that the pluripotency of ESCs has the same disadvantages in this regard as transplantations of other tissue materials. It's not natural, and the body recoils from this and fights it. Additionally, ESCs are known to induce tumors in some animal experiments (teratogenic).

ASCs by contrast (the ADULT stem cells) can be taken from one's own body by a cheek swab and easily grown in a lab setting and have enough multipotency that in many cases they can be custom grown to suit a particular organ. Amniotic stem cells are truly pluripotent, just like ESCs, and yet have none of the drawbacks other than obtaining the original source material.

That is the real template and the issue from which we need to work and wrangle over--not religion per se.