Stem Cells, Progenitor Cells, Ah, What's the Difference Anyway

Sick of me waxing wistful about Chicago? Very well--back to the usual grumbling this morning. What have we from two days ago? It's in here somewhere. Ah, yes:

Bush Vetoes Embryonic Stem Cell Bill.

Homer already pointed out the rattling cognitive dissonance created when W proclaims "Destroying human life in the hopes of saving human life is not ethical," as the carnage in Mesopotamia rolls on unabated. That on its own would be annoying enough. But the entire paragraph in the Washington Post story says this:

"Destroying human life in the hopes of saving human life is not ethical, and it is not the only option before us," said Bush, who appeared on stage with Kaitlyne McNamara of Middletown, Conn., who was born with spina bifida, and is benefiting from what he called "ethical stem cell research."

Except that she's not. Unless "ethical stem cell research" means "not based on stem cells."

The 18-year-old in question was born with spina bifida and is indeed benefiting from research that has led to the quite amazing breakthrough of regenerating a small range of organs--in this case, the bladder--from existing cells in the patient's own defective organs. But they aren't stem cells:

Over the past decade, researchers began fashioning better scaffold-like platforms that hold growing cells and dissolve inside the body. The study of stem cells, which can mature into all the body's other tissues, has also supercharged progress in regenerative medicine.

The researchers at Children's Hospital in Boston used a more mature cell type known as a progenitor. They first operated on the patients to remove bad tissue that made up more than half their bladders. They fished out muscle and bladder wall cells, seeded them on cup-like bladder-shaped scaffolds of collagen, then let the cells reproduce in the lab for seven weeks. Starting with tens of thousands, they ended up with about 1.5 billion cells. The cell-bearing molds were then surgically sewn back to the remnants of the patients' original and partly working bladders, where the lab-nurtured cells kept maturing.

Supporting effective regenerative therapy research is a very good thing. Making the public aware of the possibilities created by such research and throwing tax money at it is a good thing. Hauling a person who was helped by the narrow range of applications in which the research is successful up onto the stage as a poster child is fine. But misrepresenting that work as "stem cell research" and using the person as a visual aid to prove that fetal stem cell research is unnecessary? That's deliberately deceptive and dishonest and the very definition of "unethical," Mr. President.

And what can rely on the alleged left-wing-biased-liberal media to do? Why, we can rely on them to repeat Bush's assertion uncritically. What caption went out on Yahoo with the Reuters photo below?

President Bush hugs stem cell patient Kaitlyne McNamara after speaking about embryonic stem cell research from the East Room of the White House, June 20, 2007. (Kevin Lamarque/Reuters)

Maybe I'm splitting hairs. But, to me, this is akin to saying because I managed to fix up this cut on my arm with a butterfly bandage, no sutures are allowed for a cut on anyone else, no matter how deep it is, and I'm going to call band-aids "stitches" from now on.

Israel, Howling Wolf, and Stem Cells, Oh Joy

Note the first! In these fractious times, the US Congress finally put aside their squabbling yesterday and came together long enough to... issue a resolution affirming Israel's right to defend itself. What the hell, why not? Israel's defending itself has so far resulted in roughly 300 dead Lebanese civilians to roughly 12 dead Israeli civilians and 12 or 13 dead Israeli soldiers. That 1:25 soldier-to-civilian casualty ratio roughly mimics what we have going in Iraq (2500+ US soldiers times 25 equals about 62,500 dead Iraqis, give or take a couple thousand).

So of course the Congress wants to give moral authority to Israel. It fits quite nicely with the rationalizations for Abu Ghraib, Haditha, Mahmoudiya. You know, the "everyone else is doing it" defense. Why the Democrats jumped on board is beyond me, but I'm near the point of giving up trying to understand.

Note the second! Did anyone else notice the little blip that wasn't? The breathless announcement that

One or more Iranians witnessed North Korea's recent missile tests, deepening U.S. concerns about growing ties between two countries with troubling nuclear capabilities, a top U.S. official said on Thursday.

My own reaction was something along the lines of... how do you say... "Yeah, right, whatever." Funny how lying your way into a war makes people wary of each subsequent attempt to fire up a new war.

What else... ah, yes, note the third! The stem-cell veto. The Snowflake kids. The fetishizing of the fetus marches on relentlessly, with W making it crystal clear that the potential life represented by 400,000 microscopic clumps of cells languishing in liquid nitrogen outweighs the actualized lives of hundreds of thousands of functioning, thinking, feeling children and adults who are suffering from any number of syndromes and ailments that might one day be alleviated through stem-cell therapy.

So many dots to connect. The primacy of the fetus. The increasing power of ideologue pharmacists to deny not only emergency contraception but routine birth control as well. The increasing influence of religious fundamentalists who wish to outlaw birth control even for married couples. The federal guidelines encouraging all post-pubescent women to consider themselves pre-pregnant and frame their personal healthcare in terms of preparing for gestation. The fashion pages gushing that pregnancy is the new chic. And now the official White House policy of encouraging adoption of throwaway extra 5-day-old embryos (142 Snowflake kids so far! 399,858 to go!) and forbidding the use of any to develop treatments for diseases that are guaranteed to cause profound suffering, degradation, and ultimately early loss of life for thousands of existing people every year.

W doesn't want "innocent life" destroyed for stem-cell research. You know, this adherence to the concept of Original Sin jumping onto babies as soon as they flop out of the birth canal and automatically disqualifying them for consideration by the GOP is getting old. Is my co-worker's 11-year-old daughter, freshly diagnosed with diabetes, not an innocent life? She's been out for 11 years, going on 12, and dreams about boys, but methinks she hasn't gotten around nearly enough to have lost the "innocent" tag. She got whacked hard with the diabetes stick thanks to genes that shut down her pancreas, not through any fault of her own. My ex-sister-in-law's mother is struggling with early onset Alzheimer's. She's a church-going, God-fearing Baptist farmer's wife who with her husband raised up four friendly, polite, caring kids in rural North Carolina, the sweetest and most generous soul I've ever met. Am I to believe that her life is outweighed on the cosmic scales by a handful of blastocytes that have never seen the light of day, much less had a single coherent thought or faced hard choices and moral dilemmas and still come down on the side of goodness?