How Scientists Thwarted Bush On Stem Cell Research

[babylonsister]

http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2008-11-26/how-scientists-thwarted-bush-on-stem-cell-research/2/


How Scientists Thwarted Bush On Stem Cell Research

by Jeffrey Hart


The president did everything he could to stop embryonic stem cell research, but the states, the universities, and the global scientific community worked tirelessly to render Bush's prohibitions all but moot.

In August 2001, President Bush issued an executive order blocking federal funding for embryonic stem cell research except for some lines that were still in existence. “It’s wrong to destroy life in order to save life,” he explained. That required one to agree that a group of cells the size of the period at the end of this sentence is as important as a desperately ill human being.

Bush may have severely limited what research America could engage in, but he couldn’t build a cognitive wall around the United States. Scientific developments in other nations were written up in refereed journals and became universally available. And support for Bush’s position was crumbling within the U.S. In 2004, voters in California passed a resolution authorizing the state to spend $4 billion to support embryonic stem cell research. This immediately became the subject of litigation, but Governor Schwarzenegger enabled California laboratories to proceed by lending them money from state funds. With California now funding the research, American scientists who had moved to Singapore returned to work in California.

Private universities, Harvard and others, also went forward with their own funds. In 2004, Harvard created a multi-million dollar Harvard Stem Cell Institute, which will occupy prime real estate in the vast new Allston science campus. Since 2004, the HSCI has been a leading force in research, making dozens of new stem cell lines available for scientists nationwide.

snip//

Obama is now president-elect. He has promised to issue an executive order that will cancel Bush’s 2001 order blocking federal funding for embryonic stem cell research. But how much damage has Bush already caused in the inevitable march toward stem cell therapy? The United States has the best scientific infrastructure in the world, and he probably has inhibited scientific work somewhat by blocking federal funding. Bush may have discouraged some of the best graduate students from going into the stem cell research field. He certainly has earned himself a footnote in the history of science for doing what he could to block medical progress for political and religious reasons.

In that respect, he joins the Catholic Natural Law advocates in the Vatican who sought to ban smallpox vaccination on the grounds that it is unnatural to mix human blood with cow serum.

All of this deserves a fifth book added to the four of Alexander Pope’s Dunciad.

[grantcart]

1. Yes well after all smallpox was a devine gift.

[Peace Patriot]

2. The Roman Catholic Church has never gotten over being THE global corporate imperium

of the Middle Ages, when the Church as a worldly power gobbled up lands in many countries, ruled kings and armies, and freely imposed its tight cages upon the human mind and spirit, by brute force and by subtle force so pervasive that no one questioned them as the gatekeepers to Heaven and the voice of Almighty God, the patriarch of the universe. They still wear their swishy royal robes in many instances. They still act like the "one and only universal" Prickdom that they became five centuries after Jesus tried to create a democratic consciousness among the religious-minded. Could anybody have ever gotten anything so wrong, as the Catholic Church has done? One wrong compounded by another, century after century, unto the present.

The Church has NO ROLE TO PLAY in government, politics and secular society. None, zero, zilch. Their creation as an empire was wrong fifteen centuries ago, and is wrong today. Wealth, power, imperial edicts, tyrannical attempts to rule the human mind--all are utterly wrong and a gross violation of everything Jesus said.

And this is why the self-worshiping men of the Church get themselves into such mindbogglingly absurd corners--such as banning women priests, opposing birth control, massive child abuse and coverups, and how they get tangled up in alliances with torturers and mass murderers like the Bushwhacks. They've preserved all the trappings of power, and their fetishistic worship of the Great Prick in the Sky, and they long for a return to the 10th century, when virtually nobody could read any more and they controlled the books, and when all cowered before them as they cast human beings into eternal hell, or not, at their whim.

They are power-mad, just like Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld. They need a great big dose of HUMILITY, and a long, long penance in sack cloth and ashes.

[loudsue]

3. No shit!

:applause: Good one, PP !! :bounce:

[rasputin1952]

4. I see no reason to call what millions of people find solace in...

"The Great Prick in The Sky".

You are entitled to your opinion, but hundreds of millions who do not fall into lines that others that think they speak for God do. For every maniac who has distorted the basic tenets of religions, there are a thousand who do good in the name of a religion, whether that be Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism of any other religion. Zealots of any belief/non-belief system do no good. However, I think of all those that do do good, and I respect them...and their religions.

[babylonsister]

5. Very nice. Thank you. nt

[Peace Patriot]

6. I am not talking about religion. I am talking about SELF-WORSHIP, which the

MEN running the Roman Catholic Church are very guilty of.

And, please, I have a thorough Catholic background and education, and I'm married to a devout Catholic (who is not a prick), so I know what I am talking about. I am not spitting on anyone's religion. I would never do that. I am talking about a very particular SIN committed by a very select group of self-affirming, self-indulgent, self-worshiping men who think--and HAVE SAID--that a prick gives you a special status with God, such that you can dictate WITHOUT ERROR what God wants, that you can change bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ, and can forgive peoples' sins on God's behalf, because God has a prick, too. It is so infantile as to be ridiculous. These are grown men. That is what THEY believe--about themselves, about the priestly status that they confer upon each other, and about God. It is an error of enormous proportions. And it would make Jesus gag.

These cardinals, bishops and popes need to get over themselves. That's all I'm saying. They are arrogant assholes. And they are in grave violation of the basis of their own religion. Jesus said that, to be perfect, you must give away all that you have to the poor and "come, follow me." Are they doing that? NO! Instead, they are egotistically attached to their own power--both material and spiritual. Excluding women, and trashing the Mother Goddess, are major tenets of their egocentric power trip. That is why they are so festishistic. It is sick and it is a sickness of long standing. Truly, they are sick the way Bushites are sick. They exist in a spider's web of lies that are so thick, the truth is utterly lost. They need to take a broom to fifteen hundred years of nothing but lies, aimed at nothing but the perpetuation of the power of this boys' club. Like the Bushwhacks who hijacked our democracy, they have hijacked Christianity--a beautiful, simple, elegant teaching about love. That is all. Love. Love they neighbor. Love thine enemy. Love God's creation. Everything else--the royal Pope and his dictates, and the Mass and its fetishes, and the male priesthood, and its absurd theologies, and the vast properties and investments the Church has accumulated, and its frequent alliance with fascist causes--are what used to be called "the worship of idols," and, in the case of the men running the Church, the "idol" is the self: they worship themselves. And in their own terminology, that is a very grave sin, indeed.

I have nothing but love and deep respect for many Catholics. And I think that the spiritual or communal needs that motivate people to go to church, to join religions, or to undertake spiritual practices, are good impulses. But I think that these human needs are often exploited by unscrupulous, power-mongering preachers and institutions. That is what I am criticizing in the Roman Catholic Church. And I would criticize it in these rightwing preachers who allied themselves with the Bush Junta, or in Islamic mullahs who oppress women or in Hindus who stigmatize "untouchables"--or any such 'religious' power trips--if they were the subject under discussion. I am not anti-religious. I am anti-power-mongering. I do have a particular dislike of the arrogance of Catholic clergymen, who claim to be the "one and only" this or that. It is a lie. There is no "one and only" path to God. There is no "one and only" path to Enlightenment. There is no "one and only" set of beliefs by which to become a better human being. They live this lie. They preach this lie. They gain power over people with this lie. And I find it very objectionable.

[rasputin1952]

7. We seem to agree that it is the minds of men, (and women), that

has bastardized what the base tenets of the current major religions , none of which demand that some be excluded or tormented. You and i on the same track for the most part. I grew up around a variety of religious/non-religious beliefs, I was very fortunate in that respect, as I was able to see firsthand how much of it works. The first thing I learned was that once one attacks a person's belief system, they become exceptionally defensive, but by discussion and understanding, I saw that not only could I change people's views, but they could change mine as well. Through rational discussion, we would usually come to a common ground, discarding much of the pomp and circumstance involved w/religion that has been passed on throughout history.

If people would actually read their "holy books" instead of being guided by some misfit, they would realize that there is much more in a religion than they ever dreamed of, and very little, if any speaks of hate, division and exclusion...sadly, many of the "leaders" of a religion fail to do so. They're not alone though, in politics, most people who are in Congress might have scanned the Constitution, but they've never gone out of their way to understand it, much less abide by it...:hi: