I think the article below by Michael Kinsley (who also has PD)  expresses
the frustration that many feel on reading the news in the last few
days...While patients and scientists all over the world joyfully respond
to the breakthrough in SCNT from South Korea and the hope that it brings
... George Bush  threatens to kill the stem cell legislation that might
help hasten the promise of a cure. While the South Korean scientist
Hwang Woo-suk is honored throughout the enlightened world -- many in the
U.S. Congress, and the president  would  tie his hands and throw him in
jail.

The vote on the Castle / DeGette stem cell bill  (H.R. 810) is scheduled
for Tuesday.

Call your Representative on Monday and tell them to vote for H.R. 810.
See the Parkinson's Action Network to also send a message to your Rep.
http://capwiz.com/pan/issues/alert/?alertid=7627096&type=CO
Linda
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From:  washingtonpost.com

. . . And Fear of the Unknown

By Michael Kinsley
Washington Post
Sunday, May 22, 2005; B07

Imagine what it's like to open the newspaper (as I did Friday morning)
and read that scientists in faraway South Korea have made a huge
breakthrough toward curing a disease that is slowly wrecking your life.
But closer to home, your own government is trying to prevent that cure.

Other nations are racing for the leadership role in stem cell research
that the United States has abandoned. And individual states are defying
the federal near-ban. So it seems unlikely that U.S. government policy
will actually prevent a cure for Parkinson's and other diseases. And it's
not too likely that a cure will come in time for most current sufferers
in any event. But it might, it might. So if my government merely manages
to slow the process down -- as it already has done for years -- that is
disheartening.

The South Korean scientists apparently have developed a reliable method
for cloning from an adult human being. The theory is that stem cells
extracted from a clone of yourself are likely to be safer and more
effective than cells from leftover embryos in fertility clinics or from
animal embryos or from adult bone marrow.

Leon Kass, chairman of the President's Council on Bioethics, greeted this
thrilling news with his usual fatuous call for a "moratorium" on the
research that produced it while we think through the morality and all
that. Kass seems to imagine bioethics researchers beavering away toward a
moral breakthrough even as scientists beaver away at a medical one. All
he asks is for the scientists to take a break and let the bioethicists
catch up.

But no crash research program is going to produce some dazzling
bioethical principle we never thought of before. We know all that we're
going to know about the moral issues, and we just have to decide. There
are three issues:

First, do the embryos used for stem cell research and therapy have
rights? They are clumps of a few dozen cells, biologically more primitive
than a mosquito. They have no consciousness, are not aware that they
exist, and never have been. Nature itself creates and destroys millions
of these every year. No one objects. No one mourns. In most cases no one
even knows. If my life is worth no more than the survival of one of these
clumps, then it is terribly unfair that I can plead my case on the op-ed
page, and they can't. But I have no trouble feeling that the government
should value my life more than the lives of these clumps. God may
disagree. But the government reports to me and to other adult Americans,
not to God.

Second, is human cloning such a horrific concept that it crosses a line
into the territory of Frankenstein and "Brave New World"? Well, they said
the same thing 27 years ago about in-vitro fertilization (test-tube
babies), and that is now virtually uncontroversial. It has brought joy to
millions. And it is politically unassailable, even though the in-vitro
process produces and destroys far more "surplus" embryos than will ever
be needed for stem cell therapy. The arguments against "therapeutic"
cloning (cloning for medical purposes) tend to be abstract and poetical,
concerned with the nature of humanity and stuff. But on the subject of
stem cells, I am not in the mood for poetry.

Third, there's the slippery slope. If we're willing to destroy
microscopic embryos for their stem cells, why will we stop before
harvesting body parts from advanced fetuses, or breeding babies for their
organs? Once we allow human cloning for embryos, how can we be sure no
one will bring a cloned embryo to term and produce an actual cloned human
being?

The answer is that we can't be sure. In fact, it seems inevitable that
someone is going to go all the way with human cloning. But here's an
invitation: Can anyone point to a technological breakthrough that was
actually prevented, wisely? Maybe biological warfare, for a few decades,
or electric toothpaste dispensers. I dunno. But it's surely rare,
compared with all the episodes where blocking progress because of fear of
the unknown turned out to be either futile or mistaken.

Scientists look for solutions. Although there are no guarantees, when you
put more scientists onto a problem, you increase your chance of solving
it. By contrast professional ethicists tend to look for problems. When
you put more ethicists onto a problem, you can end up with more problems.
Cad that I am, for example, it never occurred to me to worry that cloning
embryos for stem cells "exploits women as egg donors not for their
benefit." But it occurred to Leon Kass, as quoted in Friday's New York
Times.

If the secretary of ethics is worried that evil scientists might strap
women down and extract eggs from them against their will, I agree with
him that this would be a bad approach. But there may be alternatives.
Women give up eggs as part of high-tech methods for getting pregnant, and
some of these go unused. I guess it's not cricket to use a woman's
unwanted eggs to cure dreadful diseases without her permission. But if
this is what alarms Kass, the solution is a simple release form. Or does
Kass think that using someone's eggs to cure someone else's disease is
unethical with or without her permission? Or is he ineptly trying to get
feminists on his side? Or just emptying his entire spice drawer into the
stew? Or simply thinking too hard?

It's amusing in a way to think of major scientific breakthroughs sitting
on hold while someone noodles his way through arcane ethical mazes of his
own devising. Or it would be amusing if it weren't my money. And my time.

The writer is editorial and opinion editor of the Los Angeles Times.

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