Of course, (cloning) stem cell fraud couldn't last!

Blog.bioethics.net has a guest posting by the University of Texas'self-identified "stem cell enthusiast (read that: "destructive stem cell research") John Roberts (a lawyer, not a veterinarian) that is nothing but a demonstration worthy of the Great Oz: "Don't bother to look behind the curtain! It's not necessary, because we'll find out, eventually, what's back there! Trust us we're scientists and bioethicists!"

Hey, Hwang only managed to maintain the fiction with 2 articles in Science Magazine. Which was once one of the top science journals. And he managed to do it for a year and a half. And to waste somewhere between 2000-3000 oocytes from about over a hundred women. (No one knows the exact numbers, yet. No one ever will, thanks to fabrication, poor record keeping and a purposefully wiped hard drive. The numbers and accusations change from week to week.)

And, please notice that Lawyer Roberts can barely bring himself to acknowledge what everyone else has: Hwang lied about "cloning" for embryonic stem cells. Roberts still needs to call the hypothetical process "nuclear transfer," to blur embryonic/nuclear transfer cloning/stem cells and to push for the creation of embryos for destruction and the harvest of ever more oocytes ("eggs") from more women in order to further the dream.

And, of course, it was all a dream.

I don't understand the need for this argument - or the need for more and more exploitation of women. ESC's won't ever be useful in human medicine. Cloning most certainly will never be necessary. We have "patient specific" stem cells in the patient's own body.

Perhaps, important lessons can be learned about markers, stimulating and recruiting factors from the current crude form of embyo disassembling and shotgun form of plate 'em on everything everyway we can think of. But,it would be better and more responsible to utilize animal models and focus on both adult stem cells and the local in vivo environment when and where they are found.

A Medline search yields several references to possible progenitors of beta cells in the adult or post-natal pancreas. This month, Labortatory Investigation describes mesenchymal stem cells derived from human pancreatic ductal cells. But I think the consensus is that the best hope is discovery of the factors that induce proliferation of beta cells, themselves.

Unfortunately, treating insulin-dependent diabetes will also have to deal with the patient's autoimmune response to insulin, as well as the need for increased numbers of productive beta cell islet