Among those who value a clump of cells more than a person, the idea of diverting material headed for a medical waste incinerator to the research lab is somehow akin to killing children. And that’s with material in the earliest stages of development, called blastocysts, as small or smaller than the period at the end of this sentence. No fingers, no toes, surely no brain, not even a single nerve cell.
If the usual suspects get wind of this new treatment in late stage testing, it’ll be a full on wingnut freakout jamboree:
“Data from the laboratory safety tests, neurological examinations and neurofunctional tests conducted thus far indicate that the ReN001 treatment is safe and well-tolerated at the initial dose,” the company said in a statement on Thursday. The procedure involves injecting ReNeuron’s neural stem cells into patients’ brains in the hope they will repair areas damaged by stroke, thereby improving both mental and physical function. It uses stem cells derived from human fetuses rather than embryos, which were used in a stem cell trial to treat patients with spinal cord injuries by Geron Corp of the United States.
Oh yeah, fetal stem lines, from fetuses, of the human species, or the human kind for you flat-earthers. OK, it’s a little gory sounding. But not nearly as much as, say, removing the still beating heart from a brain-dead corpse and putting it in uncle Jim’s chest, or work on grafting artificial skin made from a derived pus gland on the underside of large arachnids into the freshly seared flesh of a burn victim.
The fact is human trauma is gory, it is after all the definition of blood and gore. That’s why only a segment of the population at large look forward to a career up to their elbows in someone else’s blood and guts. There was a time when they would have been heretics, when cutting into a dead human body or a live one — with the possible exception of saving their immortal soul with horrific torture of course — was considered a sin. Fortunately we got past that, despite the same kind of resistance among the same kind of authoritarian shitheads trying to stop stem cell research.
Excellent blog and info. One of my favorites.
No, no, no! You can’t use frozen embryos for research purposes. Don’t you know that very soon hundreds of women will come forward wanting to become the gestational mother of a Snowflake Adoption?
These little blastocysts have souls, you know, and while Jesus lets the the little souls hang out in the liquid nitrogen, the embryo souls will be given reseurrection bodies at the the creation of the New Heaven and the New Earth after the Millennium.
Of course, it may come to be the case that any woman who reaches the age of 31 without having done her womanly duty to God and The State will face a set of carrots and sticks that strongly
encouragecoerce her to stop shirking her obligations.One great thing about the snowflakes is that whites are probably overrepresented. Hmmm, Seems a huge problem with Himmler’s old Lebensborn program is that the mothers had to be sufficiently Aryan. But don’t we already have a pretty high number of women in INS detention camps? The inferior races could be used to breed the mighty Anglo snowflakes.
I can see a problem with this. If we have a full fundie takeover, immigrants of all kinds will stop coming here. Might not be enough brown folk to gestate all the snowflakes. No matter, plenty of women write for Scarleteen. They’ll be able to reduce their sentences by gestating a snowflake baby.
Hmmmm, sounds like I’ve come up with a good idea for a dystopian novel. Too bad someone already wrote The Handmaid’s Tale. It’s sad that book is more relevant today than when it was written.
Is there a Handmaid’s Tale fanfic site? Maybe I could write some gnarly story where feminist bloggers are forced to gestate snowflake blastocysts as punishment for their crimes. But that would bring up a moral dilemma. I’d want to write the “snowflaking” scenes as rape-y as possible with lots of ritual humiliation to increase the horror, but I’m afraid I’d just attract a bunch of forced-birther conservative pervs who’d just get off to it.
… stem cells derived from human fetuses rather than embryos…
Rather odd they’d prefer to use older cells, but presumably they have a results-based reason. Maybe it makes baby Jesus cry louder, ‘cuz that’s always a plus.
The source article doesn’t describe the source of fetal cells, but our esteemed host’s “… fetal stem lines…” implies that the injected cells were lab-cultured rather than taken directly from fetal remnants. Of course, the history of vaccines including cultured fetal cells indicates that this does approximately zero to reduce fundie backlash.