The world of science can sometimes feel like being in the land of Oz. There are many wonders there, but there is also a good deal of silliness.
Just this week, there was the announcement that a research team had managed to get stem cells from a cloned monkey. The media have been simply beside themselves explaining how this is such a great advancement and will eventually lead to the kinds of miracle cures the Kerry-Edwards campaign promised four years ago and that Michael J. Fox and Christopher Reeve were spokesmen for.
As usual, the media are dead wrong about this bit of stem cell news, on several counts, as they have been in general on the issue of stem cell research.
The first thing to note is that, although there’s been an effort this week to say these stem cells did not raise issues of tissue rejection, in fact they do. There’s a disparity between the touted “promise” of universal cures from stem cells and the problem of tissue rejection. Cloned cells would not be rejected by a patient’s body if the clone is OF the patient being treated. But if, as is likely, cloning will be restricted, or rejected by a particular patient for moral reasons, then stem cells obtained this way will necessarily not be a complete match and will face all the hurdles of any modern tissue transplant.
Second, the method of cloning is grossly inefficient. It’s downright hit or miss, mostly miss. Cloning efforts have always required dozens or even hundreds of attempts to obtain even one viable clone. Politicization and government involvement in research, such as the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine, have locked scant research dollars into this dubious method of procuring stem cells. Not only is it inefficient, but many people, myself included, believe it is highly unethical as the clones created are living beings, not just tissue samples.
Third, the stem cells obtained by this method are the type that is referred to as “pluripotent” — supposedly capable of turning into any kind of cell in the body. In real lab tests, however, these types of stem cells have always produced nothing except tumors.
So the monkey clone research has shown that it is indeed possible to obtain rejection-prone, tumor-producing stem cells from the wildly inefficient and unethical process of cloning. This is considered good news in California, because it proves all those billions of dollars CIRM is parceling out may actually go to produce something useless. Before, by which I mean when politicians lied and sold California the CIRM proposition, nobody even knew if cloning could work and produce the miracle stem cells (that don’t actually work).
Meanwhile, real successes with adult stem cells, which work and can be obtained ethically from just about any body tissue without killing any clones or risking tissue rejection, go starving for lack of government funding.
In news of an actual scientific advancement that doesn’t involve flawed assumptions, wasted tax dollars and unethical research (what used to just be called science), Boston University researchers are getting close to a method that will allow a paralyzed man to talk.
The patient, who has been conscious but unable to speak for eight years since a car crash, has electrodes implanted in his brain. This allows him to interface with a computer that uses special speech software. Researchers are able to interpret the man’s brainwaves and believe they can interpret the sound he is imagining with about 80 percent accuracy.
In the next few weeks, their computer will begin the task of turning his thoughts into sounds.
There is a lot of good, cutting-edge science being done in this country. But whenever the government gets overly involved, as with stem cells and global warming, all you get is flimflam and wasted taxpayer money that could be spent on better things.
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