Wrapup!!

In the past six weeks or so, our group has come to believe that many other countries have come to the forefront of stem cell technology, while America falls behind in this beneficial and profitable field. For example, England has a much more ideal system of researching stem cells. The British government supports and provides funding for stem cell research for medicinal purposes. South Korea also promotes the research and has developed a competitive program. We believe that America should similarly fund certain appropriate circumstances of embryonic stem cell research. In England, for instance, women have the opportunity to donate their stem cells that fail to develop as desired. The problem with this is that these stem cells are not ideal for growth and research. While we do not advocate cloning of any sort, we do believe that cures to diseases such as Parkinson’s, multiple sclerosis, Alzheimer’s, diabetes, heart disease, and paralysis, to name a few, could be developed from more extensive embryonic stem cell exploration. Cures to these diseases are more important to the world (in our opinion) than small clumps of cells that may or may not turn into a person someday. Unfortunately, many religions condemn this process, labeling it murder. Scientists frown upon this religious viewpoint and are eager to delve into these vast medical possibilities as soon as possible because any results would be extremely advantageous but would also require a very long period of time to become available.
We feel that America should at least try to use our technology to further life. The religious right should weigh their priorities differently.

Article : The University of Wisconsin at Madison

Five years later, stem cells still tantalize In early November of 1998, when human embryonic stem cells were introduced to the world, the possibilities seemed astonishing.
"It is not too unrealistic to say that this research has the potential to revolutionize the practice of medicine and improve the quality and length of life," then-National Institutes of Health Director Harold Varmus told a Senate hearing less than a month after Wisconsin biologist James Thomson reported his stem cell feat in the journal Science.
Varmus went on: "There is almost no realm of medicine that might not be touched by this innovation."
Today, five years after the shy University of Wisconsin-Madison scientist published his succinct but earthshaking paper showing that stem cells—ephemeral, blank slate cells that occur at the earliest stages of human development—could be isolated, cultured and grown in apparently limitless quantities, enthusiasm is tempered.
The public cheerleading of Varmus and others, without a doubt, helped make stem cells a household word and set a high (and unrealistic) expectation that therapies for a host of debilitating cell-based diseases were just around the corner.
There is no doubt among biologists that embryonic stem cells have vast potential. There are no other cells that can perform the same biological feats as embryonic stem cells. They can morph into any one of the 220 types of cells and tissues in the human body. Nurtured in their undifferentiated state, they can proliferate endlessly in culture, and provide a vast supply of cells for research and, someday, therapy. And perhaps most importantly of all, they provide our only window to the earliest stages of human development and, after differentiation, access to more specialized cells that could vastly improve our understanding of the onset of cell-based diseases, and perhaps ways to prevent them.
But as Thomson himself emphasized in 1998, their glitziest application in the clinic—the tantalizing potential of transforming transplant medicine by creating large quantities of cells to treat debilitating diseases such as Parkinson's, diabetes and ALS—would be a decade in the future under the best of circumstances.
"We went through this period of extreme hype and high expectations," recalls Carl Gulbrandsen, managing director of the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF), the private, not-for-profit foundation that holds Wisconsin's patents to stem cell technology. "Things seem to have settled down, but people still expect a lot, and we're still in a tight political environment."
Indeed, the politics of stem cells from the outset have been as far reaching as the technology itself promises to be. Extending from the Oval Office, where stem cells became the dominant domestic issue of the first eight months of the Bush Administration, to the other end of State Street, where a few state legislators remain determined to criminalize the research, the political dimensions of stem cell science have framed a national debate and influenced many aspects of how the research is done and funded.
According to Gulbrandsen, the administration's decision to permit federal funds to be used for research on at least some stem cells lines—a decision heavily influenced by former Wisconsin governor and current Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson—was a turning point in the debate.
"Bush's decision was a landmark decision," Gulbrandsen says. "A lot of people don't like it, but it was an ingenious political solution. That decision wouldn't have occurred without Tommy Thompson there."
Although wading through a political quagmire was difficult and sometimes painful for the retiring biologist Thomson, it was a necessary exercise.
"The first year or two (after first isolating the cells) were pretty much wasted due to politics," says Thomson. "But since then we've done pretty well" in the lab.
The early flood of publicity, breathless in its descriptions of the medical and research potential of stem cells, Thomson feared, would set unrealistic expectations in the public mind. Lost in the glowing words, he says, are the hard and painstaking realities of basic science.

If we can't use stem cells, what can we use?

Scientists in Texas say a common protein called Thymosin works to protect heart attack victims from severe heart damage afterward. Some scientist, who were not involved with the experimnt, believe Thymosin could heal the heart muscles better than stem cells, and that it would be easier than trying to get stem cells prepared and injected properly. Best of all, Thymosin would not be the source of moral controversy like stem cell research is. Conservatives should appreciate this alternate to stem cell research for heart restoration. Perhaps conservatives and liberals could compromise by allowing stem cells to be used when there is not an adequate alternative, but when there is an alternative available, scientists could use that instead. Then, conservatives might feel a little like stem cells are not being used frequently enough for it to be a huge problem. I doubt it, though.

Experiments performed with mice have shown that mice that were administered one dose of Thymosin after experiencing heart failure had their heart function improve at least twice as much as mice who were not treated with the protein. This protein could lead to a remedy, other than stem cells, for the cause of heart failure. Ambulances may be equipped with Thymosin as early as next year so victims can receive protection as soon as possible after a heart attack. Stem cells, however, would not be ready to be used in America as early as next year. Any treatments using stem cells will probably take a few years before they are available, because the issue is so widely disputed (in America).