Details about James Kelly "Muffling" Incident
I have been asked to provide more details of the incident, mentioned in a previous entry, in which James Kelly was forcefully prevented from telling Christopher Reeve about advances in spinal cord injury research using adult stem cells. I am happy to oblige. Here is Kelly's account of the incident from a column linked below for the Seoul Times:
"Later that year I debated the practicality of cloning with Reeve at the New York Academy of Sciences. At Reeve's request I tried to tell him of an adult bone marrow clinical trial for ALS and SCI in Turin, Italy. But as I began to speak I was physically muzzled from behind by the scientific moderator of the debate. While I struggled to pull his hands from my mouth, fifty reporters looked on in stunned silence and Reeve's handlers quickly wheeled him from the room.
Not a word of this reached the public and Reeve remained in the dark."
For those interested, the entire column, which is about adult stem cell research, it is well worth reading.
posted by Wesley J. Smith @ 12:43 PM
4 Comments
4 Comments:
I do, I was, and I shall. Thanks.
"While I struggled to pull his hands from my mouth, fifty reporters looked on in stunned silence and Reeve's handlers quickly wheeled him from the room."
But did any of those fifty reporters FRIGGIN' WRITE ABOUT THIS INCIDENT? I'm banking on "no." "Let us all agree not to mention this. It might not make them look good."
Give that man a cigar! The answer would be, no. Of course not. What, and make the ESCR side look bad? Are you kidding? Write the full truth, surely you jest!
All right: James Kelly has been saying something I've been thinking about a lot--Why tie ourselves in knots about trying to make embryonic cells work? Even aside from the pure ethical issues, it's such a _waste_ with the teratoma issues and tumor issues, just to name a couple of examples, when adult stem cells show so much promise. If the whole thing weren't linked in the liberal mind with the abortion issue, embryonic stem-cell research might just be regarded as another dead end and all the breast-beating and hysteria would never have arisen.
Which raises a pointed question: Why does a good man like Hurlbut worry himself about trying to find "ethical" ways to make embryonic stem cells? Why not just say, "This whole thing is a stupid waste anyway, it carries more risk than promise, and we pro-lifers are under no obligation to kill ourselves finding a way to make ethical embryonic or even embryo-like stem cells"?
I say, that good fellow has been given a false conscience about the whole thing. He's worrying about something he shouldn't be worrying about, and he's not really making anybody all that excited.
I note, too, the _explicit_ analogy between ANT cells and teratomas, the analogy made so strongly that no less a person than Ramesh Ponnuru insisted that ANT cells just _are_ teratomata and that this is why making them is ethical. (And this is promising research?) Even though Ponnuru was wrong, mistaking an analogy for an identity statement, the possibility of cancer from these cells raises exactly the sort of issues Kelly raises about regular embryonic stem cell research.
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