A new year, a new subject but same ole yahoo shit

Bush won. Why would I think the mindset of the country would alter, or even become saner, with the new year?

In Kansas, we are again battling the anti-science yahoos. The freakin' attorney general of the great state of Kansas has even met secretly with the six (of 10) state education board members who support putting "intelligent design" into the science curriculum. He has promised them the state of Kansas will defend their position.

And then in Missouri we have Republican state senators debating at what point does a soul appear in life and whether Adam and Eve were spontaneously generated. Is the mercury content in our drinking water too high? Is this why we as a nation seem to be slipping into a collective insanity?

Read this from this morning's Kansas City Star (abridged):

JEFFERSON CITY — Martie Meador stepped haltingly toward the witness table to tell Missouri senators her view of a proposed ban on research that might cure her multiple sclerosis.

Meador, a mother of four from Warrenton, said the research technique creates a human embryo that is killed when the stem cells are removed. That makes the price of potential new cures too high.

“I do not support the idea that we need to create life and then destroy it in the name of medical research,” Meador said.

She and more than 60 others came to the Capitol last week to share their stories with senators who are considering a bill that would ban a procedure for growing stem cells, the building blocks of all human tissue.

Through that process, scientists hope to discover how to use stem cells to regenerate diseased or injured tissue and find cures for many maladies, from Parkinson's and heart disease to diabetes and spinal injuries.

Testifying against a ban was LaNeal Skinner of Kansas City. Her husband, Gary Skinner, was 49 when he was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease, which plunged the couple into a three-year spiral of loneliness and despair.

Skinner pleaded with senators to let the research go forward so that future Alzheimer's victims wouldn't suffer the same fate as her husband, who died in 1999.

“The one thing my husband didn't have was hope,” she said. “Please don't take that away from others.”

The women's testimony brought into focus the crucial questions that senators are grappling with as they decide on the proposed ban. The Senate Judiciary Committee is scheduled to vote Monday on legislation that would declare a certain type of cutting-edge medical research a felony in Missouri. A similar bill was introduced this week in Kansas.

In evaluating Senate Bill 160, senators also may consider the effect of such a ban on efforts to make Kansas City and St. Louis centers of life science research.

The bill forces senators to weigh the objections of people who say the research kills human beings against the potential benefits to people suffering from a wide range of diseases. In the process, senators must confront questions about when life begins, what makes something human and at what point an embryo has a human soul.

Sen. Chris Koster, a Harrisonville Republican and a former Cass County prosecutor, summed up the conundrum by considering the issue through the eyes of a juror.

“We've been struggling through more than eight hours of testimony about whether this process creates a human being,” Koster said. “How could a juror decide beyond a reasonable doubt that this process cloned a human being?”

The controversy involves a technique known as therapeutic cloning. Researchers take a human egg cell and remove its nucleus. They take the nucleus from an ordinary body cell and transfer it into the hollowed-out egg cell.

The egg cell is stimulated to divide, just as an egg cell does after fertilization by a sperm cell. The cells are placed in a nutrient culture and allowed to develop into a ball of about 300 cells. Inside that ball are the stem cells — the building blocks of every type of cell in the human body — that have yet to differentiate into nerve, muscle, blood or bone cells.

Researchers are trying to discover how to prod the stem cells into becoming the various tissues of the body such as insulin-producing cells for diabetics or new nerve cells for spinal injury patients.

Gov. Matt Blunt said this week that he did not believe the process creates a new human life. Blunt said that if the bill reached his desk, he was likely to veto it. (A REPUBLICAN, BELIEVE IT OR NOT. I SWEAR, IF HE DOES, I MIGHT JUST VOTE FOR HIM NEXT TIME!)



About 40 opponents of the ban said the technique does not create a human life, only a cluster of cells identical to the patient who donated the nucleus. They urged senators not to block the dramatic advances in medical care that the technique might offer.

Bernard Frank of Chesterfield, who has had Parkinson's disease for 13 years, objected to the certainty with which supporters of the ban stated their case.

“I've heard it said that a cluster of cells that sit on the point of a pin is a human being,” Frank said. “No one in this room knows whether it's a human being. But I do know that these are my cells, no one else's. (In this process) they are mixed in a lab and given back to me. It's like taking blood from a patient before surgery.”

Senators probed both the science and the ethical issues surrounding therapeutic cloning. Sen. John Loudon, a St. Louis County Republican, said the question comes down to when life begins. Sen. Jason Crowell, a Cape Girardeau Republican, asked at what point a fertilized egg acquires a soul.


William Neaves, president of the Stowers Institute for Medical Research in Kansas City, which wants to do embryonic stem cell research, pointed to the writings of Richard McCormick, a Catholic priest considered one of the American church's leading medical ethicists.

McCormick noted that the majority of human eggs fertilized within a woman's body never implant in the uterus. Therefore, the fertilized egg is not a human being until implantation, he concluded.

Because it is not a human being, the cells that result from fertilization could be used in medical research, McCormick wrote. Therapeutic cloning, however, never gets to that point, because the cells that develop are not the product of a sperm and an egg, Neaves said.

Susan Talve, a St. Louis rabbi whose daughter suffers from a congenital heart defect, opposed the ban, saying early stem cell research has the potential to discover ways to grow new heart-muscle cells. The point at which life begins, she said, is unknowable.

“I believe in a world beyond this life,” Talve said. “But I don't really know. It's a matter of faith. Just as we can't know for sure about the end of life, I'm not sure we can know about the beginning of life, either.”

Larry Weber, executive director of the Missouri Catholic Conference, dismissed McCormick's writings as academic musings. The Catholic Church teaches that ensoulment takes place at conception. How that occurs, he said, is unknown.

Others said it was disingenuous to claim that the cells were not a human being, because the same cloning process was used to create Dolly the cloned sheep.

But Sen. Charles Wheeler, a physician and a Kansas City Democrat, said it took the union of an egg and a sperm to create a human. Without a sperm cell, the result of therapeutic cloning is a laboratory product, not a person, he said.

“If there is no sperm in the room, it's not the same as a human being,” Wheeler said.

“I think you're twisting the truth,” he told one witness. “You heard the scientists the other night. There is something divine about the creation of a human by a man and a woman. … Doctors want to take an (ordinary body) cell and use it to create a heart cell. To make that a crime is a crime.”

Wesley Smith, an author who writes on the sanctity of human life, told senators that cloning cells should be banned because all human life has intrinsic moral value.

“Your soul didn't come from your mother and father,” Smith said. “If one believes in a soul, it comes from God.”

Weber agreed, saying Jesus became human without sperm being involved. And Loudon mentioned the creation of Adam and Eve.

“To say that (product of therapeutic cloning) is not human life is to deny the divinity and humanity of Jesus,” Weber said. “God doesn't depend on sexual methods of reproduction.”