CT Taxpayers To Fund Human Cloning Research
April 14th, 2008 by Peter
First, the good news. Embryo-destructive research has become so obviously pointless that even our state’s scientists have begun to notice it:
The Connecticut Stem Cell Research Advisory Committee doled out almost $10 million in state grants to Connecticut scientists Tuesday [April 1st], including one that has the potential to take some of the controversy out of stem cell research.
That grant went to a group of University of Connecticut scientists who formed a rare collaboration between researchers at the main campus in Storrs and the Health Center in Farmington.
Led by Theodore Rasmussen of the Center for Regenerative Biology at UConn, the group plans to coax human skin cells into embryonic cells through a process called nuclear reprogramming. The process, one of the hottest fields in biology, does not require the use of human embryos to create stem cells, removing a major ethical hurdle to stem cell research.
But despite that “major ethical hurdle,” our state is still willing to put your tax dollars to work on clone-and-kill research:
Another grant went to a private biotech company called Evergen that was started at UConn by cloning pioneer Xiangzhong “Jerry” Yang, who announced two years ago that he would attempt to be the first to clone a human embryo for the purpose of creating stem cells.
Yang has returned to his native China, where he is battling cancer, and his lab is being run by other researchers. And while it appears that nuclear reprogramming might make embryo cloning obsolete, the committee Tuesday set aside $900,000 for Evergen’s work.
So that’s $900,000 of your money to ethically questionable human cloning research which “might” be obsolete, as the Courant delicately describes it. Now that it’s three years later, does anyone even remember that the 2005 law authorizing state funding of this research supposedly forbade any of it being spent on cloning?
Finally, there’s the “island of Dr. Moreau” research:
The longest debate, by far, centered on a proposal by Yale School of Medicine researcher D. Eugene Redmond to find a way to repair brain cells damaged by Parkinson’s disease by transplanting stem cells from human fetal brain tissue into the brains of monkeys.
The so-called neural stem cells have showed promise in mice, but monkey brains are much more similar to those of humans and thus an essential component of testing before such treatment could ever be tried on human subjects, said Haifan Lin, director of the Yale Stem Cell Center.
In an eerie echo of the sci fi classic, this reseach will literally be conducted on an island: St. Kitts in the Caribbean.
How ironic. Just the other day, I spoke with a prospective “Republican” (for lack of a better term) candidate for our state legislature. When I asked him about his stance on life/family issues, he never did directly answer my question, but instead, and with a condescending tone, droned on about how such issues are not “political.” I think perhaps I did receive an answer to my question after all, even if indirectly. As for that aspiring legislator, if I were he, I would not quit the day job just yet.
We can debate “left wing” and “right wing” to our hearts’ content, but both wings are still attached to the same misguided, devious, or “loony” bird. Case in point: let us not forget that this abomination of a committee that cuts checks off our dime, earned from our sweat for this scientific shell game was the brainchild of our so-called “Republican” Governor, in collusion with our Socialist-leaning Democrat-controlled legislature.
I sadly doubt that much will ever change unless or until at least one more party strongly comes to fruition, and more specifically, one of common sense and principle, and with an ear more attentive and sympathetic to the citizens, and not the corporate insiders and the shadowy elitists pulling the strings of both parties in this rigged game from behind the scenes.
As if our upcoming presidential election were not enough of an abhorrent farce, Lenin would indeed be especially proud of the “Useful Idiots” that Connecticut, the state ironically dubbed “The Constitution State” almost always has to offer. And we continue to painfully see the results.
That is hardly a distinction worthy of bragging rights.
Doug