FACE THE FACTS, PEOPLE. MILLIONS OF US WILL NOT BE ABLE TO RECEIVE AN ADULT STEM CELL TRANSPLANT BECAUSE A DONOR WON’T BE FOUND IN TIME. THE BETTER CHANCE FOR SURVIVAL IS A RELATED DONOR TRANSPLANT. THE ODDS OF MATCHING A SIBLING ARE 0NE IN FOUR. MY HUSBAND MATCHED HIS BROTHER, BUT HIS SISTER DIDN’T MATCH EITHER OF THEM. THEREFORE, HAD SHE BEEN THE PATIENT, SHE WOULD HAVE HAD TO WAIT UNTIL A DONOR WAS FOUND OR USE HER OWN (TREATED) BLOOD FOR TRANSPLANT. NEITHER IS AS EFFECTIVE AS IS A RELATED DONOR ONE.

Adult stem cells useful? This certainly is an understatement at best. They are the ONLY ones which have shown success in living subjects. Over 70 some applications to date!

Adult stem cells are in very small numbers in the body and hard to locate? And you would tell us that an 8-cell embryo is any better? How many must be destroyed before we realize that partially differentiated adult stem cells from a host, which are furthermore less likely to be rejected by that host’s immune system, are a more viable option.

It only makes sense that going BACK to the embryonic stage is a step backward–not forward-in isolating nature’s best healing option so far as stem cells are concerned.

Now that skin cells can be chemically treated and regressed to virtual embryo status there is really no need to continue destroying 46 chromosome babies for research purposes.

President Bush did not ban the use of embryonic stem cells; he only banned _federal funding_ of embryonic stem cell research. Even this ban was not total; he actually authorized funding of research using existing stem cell lines (so that no new embryos would be destroyed in research receiving federal funding), which no other administration had done.

The rumors of Bush’s “War on Science” are highly exaggerated.

Second, adult stem cell therapies have proven to be extremely successful, while embryonic stem cell therapies have proven to be quite difficult to control. What happens when you lose control of an embryonic stem cell? You get cancer. What kind of choice is that for a patient? “We can cure your XYZ if you don’t mind getting cancer afterwards.”

Left out of the article is the fact that using someone else’s stem cells (embryonic or adult) forces you to take anti-rejection drugs for the rest of your life, just like any other transplant patient. One of the big advantages of therapies that utilize your own adult stem cells is that your body accepts them, and no anti-rejection drugs are needed.

This will fuel calls to reject embryo research which, after a decade of work – has failed to produce any treatments.

In this latest advance, scientists at Harvard Medical School used cells from the skin of adults suffering from diseases to produce stem cells that act like those taken from embryos.

Stem cells are the body’s ‘master’ cells, which can be grown into various kinds of body tissues. Scientists hope to use them to repair damaged tissues.

This latest breakthrough will allow researchers to gain insights into the cause of illnesses including Type 1 diabetes, Down’s syndrome and Huntington’s disease.

Researchers hope that by ‘rewinding’ the stem cells from patients with diseases to this embryonic-like state they will be able to learn more about the way the diseases develop.

Scientists around the world are increasingly moving towards non-embryonic stem cell research.

Verified accomplishments of adult (non-embryonic) stem cell research from sources such as bone marrow and umbilical cord blood are already providing hope and therapy for patients suffering from heart muscle injury, diabetes and brain damage from stroke and at least 72 conditions — with realistic promise for treating other diseases on the horizon.

Breakthroughs, like this one from Harvard, have led a number of scientists to move away from embryonic stem cell research.

The scientist behind the Harvard work, Willy Lensch, said: “This will help us understand the environmental causes that push these undefined cells to become diseases.

“We can look at what is happening to the hormones, the genes, the growth factors, and compare that to cells that don’t have the mutations – learn new things.”

Scientists also at Children’s Hospital in Oakland, California, are discovering a potential cure for leukemia and sickle-cell disease by using adult blood stem cells from the placentas of women who have had Caesarian deliveries.

But researchers at the hospital are frustrated. State agencies have made multi-million-dollar grants available for embryo-destructive research, but money is scarce for its ethically sound counterpart, adult stem cell research.

In the Contra Costa Times, lead Children’s Hospital researcher Frans Kuypers says, “No one has been cured by an embryonic stem cell. We are able to cure folks with [adult] stem cells.”

So why isn’t adult stem cell research receiving more funding? Josephine Quintavalle, director of Comment on Reproductive Ethics, says “What you get from [the adult stem cell] approach is a patient-specific cure. There’s no middleman . . . and there’s no drug company that’s going to get rich as a result of it.”

But, she explains, a lot of the pressure for stem-cell research is to find products that they can sell, as opposed to a treatment they can do to cure you.