Hi Raj, This is a great response. Too bad it will not appear in The San Jose Mercury News, CA... Too bad it will not appear on the front page of every National paper in North America... Too bad because in spite of all efforts to influence Parliament in Canada, tomorrow marks Third Reading of Bill C-13 An Act Respecting Assisted Human Reproductive Technologies and Related Research. Too bad because in their frenzy to ban Reproductive Cloning, the well intentioned Parliamentarians are also going to ban ALL forms of Therapeutic Cloning and, in the process, CRIMINALIZE all forms of research in Therapeutic Cloning. We did not ask that they open the door wide to anything and everything. We simply asked that they leave a well guarded, well regulated, door for our scientists to potentially perform research into regenerative medicine. Research into cures for Cancer, for heart disease, for diabetes, for Alzheimers, and yes, for Parkinson's. In their zeal to stop the Raeliens and all others of that ilk, Parliament is instead going to BRICK the research doorway forever SHUT, and pat themselves on the back. We put up a website and thought we might garner the support of thousands of like minded Canadians who would stand up and be counted. see: http://www.TherapeuticCloning.ca We were wrong. Too few visited the site, read the LETTER to the Health Minister, signed it electronically, forwarded the URL etc. We thought it was a simple process whose time had come. Wrong again! Apathy reigns! The site is still active and I encourage anyone who listened and read this far, to visit the site and read the LETTER etc. Too bad they won't .... murray On 30 Mar 2003 at 14:22, Brightline wrote: Hi! Murray: This is a very interesting posting. ``Do No Harm: The Coalition of Americans for Research Ethics'' argument is very unreasonable for the following reasons: 1. The embryos would have been destroyed any way. I do not see any moral or ethical problems in using the cells from the embryos that are never destined to be implanted in a womans womb or becme a full fledged human being by any other means. I would like to give Dr. Fitzgerald a good example to think about: The philosophy behind using the stem cells from the embryos destined to be discarded is very similar, if not identical, to the idea behind organ donation. The government recommends and encourages donating your organs, or even your wholebodies for medical research, when and if you die accidentally or otherwise (since our body is going to be destroyed without any further use, one way or the other, just burried and let to disintegrate or cremated), so it can be transplanted into a needy individual, without which he/she can not live; e.g., kidney, liver, heart , lung etc., or used for medical research. There seems to be no ethical problem in such cases. When one wants use the stem cells from an embryo to be discarded, these people begin to talk about ethical and moral issues. The organ donor willingly donates the organ. The only difference between organ donation for transplantation and stem cell harvest from the unused embryos is that we did not get the consent from the embryos. However, we also did not get their consent to destory them. Did we? 2. When does a life originates? This is a wrong question to ask. A living cell comes from another living cell. Biologically speaking, life is a continuous process. Once dead it is gone. That is how extinction of living organisms occurs. Everybody defines the process of fertilization as the beginning of life. Again this is a wrong statement. Both the sperm and the egg are living cells too! Fertilization, whether this happens in vitro or otherwise, is the beginning of the life of a new individual. " Life begins at fertilization, when the ``genetic code is complete and operative,'' according to the group. That means that the embryos are not just clusters of cells but ``are the tiniest of human beings.'' We all agree that the life of a new individual starts at fertilization. But, the birth control pills block successful implantation of the fertilized embryonic cell (a new embryonic human being has already sarted his/her journey towards development) by inducing a process equivalent to abortion. Just think of how many millions of ladies are taking birth control pills. A modern woman on the average goes through 500 menstural cyles in her life. Except a couple or a handful of the products of fertilization, every other fertilized human embryo is routinely killed because of the pills. Where were these ethicist when the BC pills became an everyday thing? Except the Catholic Church, nobody else even thinks about this issue at all. How many of these ethicists do use birth control pills? How come killing the early human embryo by birth control pills is ethical? Let us be honest. Don't you sense some degree of hypocrisy here? 3. If killing a human embryo is not ethical, then even in vitro fertilizatioin should be considered non-ethhical, because one produces several embryos out of which only one is implanted and the rest are left to die! We can literally kill these would be human beings, but we cannot make use of the cells for helping another indvidual to lead a healthy life? I cannot understand why this is not as ethical as donating an organ for helping another life to proceed, when one dies. Assuming one half of the human population of 10 billions, if 5 billion females all give rise to roughly even half of their reproductve potential, with in one generation there would not be enough room to accommodate all these human beings on this earth! That is the way Nature works. Nature always over produces the young of the species simply to make sure at least a few of them would survive and become adults to be able to reproduce the species. Every living specie does that starting from plants to humans, that is Nature's rule. 4. FitzGerald says a truly global dialogue is needed on embryonic stem cell research, since research done in the United States, Sweden or elsewhere has a potential worldwide impact. I simply do not see the necessity for or usefulness in a global dialogue on this issue. There shall be always opposing views on every issue. Different societies (countires) are going to take different decisions. No unanimous agreement will result on such important issues. Not one country is going to prevent the decision on such importnt issues taken by another country, by conudcting deliberatons on a global scale. The recent events in the United Nations would serve as an example. 5. ``The potential for embryonic stem cells is really fantastic,'' said Hamberger, who has ties to two Swedish companies involved with stem cells, Cell Therapeutics Scandinavia and Vitrolife. This is the concensus of all the scientists in the world. Every review on stem cell applications in regeneratve medicine concludes that embryonic stem cells have a broad spectrum of developmental and differentiation potential than adult stem cells. The Therapeutic stem cell cloning after somatic cell nuclear transplantation is the best compromise to induce patient-specific embryonic stem cells without involging the process of fertilization and will potentially avoid immune rejection of "transplanted" cells. The regeneration based therapy of debilitating diseases, several inherited diseases and other patological situations will help almost 75% of the humanity within a decade or two. But, we should know a lot more about these stem cells before we can attempt at curing diseases. Questions like how they maintain themselves as stem cells for severl generations and how do they differentate into different cell types (there are above 200 different cell types in a human body) need to be answered. The studies on both adult stem cells and SCNT-derived embryonic stem cells (therapeutic cloning) are in their infancy. We cannot kill such studies in their embryonic stges with total disregard to the enrmous promise they hold out to the betterment of humanity. We are morally and ethically bund to explore these new avenues of makkin g human life better for the same of people that are surring as we spenmd our time arguing about obvious things. I do not see any ethics or morality in such indiscrimminate banning of stem cell research. We all agree it is ethically and morally wrong to clone a human being. We should all have a global discussion on how one can safegaurd against such irresponsible act. Both the adult stem cell research and the studies on SCNT-embryonic cells should be allowed to proceed without any delay, while we put severe restrictions n stem cell research with strict guidelines attached with severfe penalties and safegaurds against "mad Scientists" who might be tempted to clone a human being either for money, thrill or cheap publicity. Raj ---------------------------------------------------------------------- To sign-off Parkinsn send a message to: mailto:[log in to unmask] In the body of the message put: signoff parkinsn * * * Murray Charters <[log in to unmask]> http://www.geocities.com/murraycharters/ ---------------------------------------------------------------------- To sign-off Parkinsn send a message to: mailto:[log in to unmask] In the body of the message put: signoff parkinsn