THE ECONOMIST Notices Adult Stem Cells
I consider The Economist to be the world's best weekly news magazine. I often disagree with its perspective, but its journalism is usually top notch. (For example, it was one of the only news outlets to report the great Advanced Cell Technology's ES Cell Non Breakthrough correctly.) Perhaps it is the interesting absence of bylines...
In this story, we learn that a patient's own neural stem cells look to be quite helpful in improving the recovery from a serious head injury.
The procedure is in early human trials. Gee, if it all works out, we won't have to wait 20 years for cloned ES cells to do the same job.
posted by Wesley J. Smith @ 6:08 PM
6 Comments
6 Comments:
But the other way, ESCR, would take more sacrificial commitment. We could seal our leagues with blood sacrifices of the innocent and bind ourselves to each other by mutual guilt, and then anticipate the gods' blessing of rains and good crops and SUVs.
We could be like the Mayans in Mel Gibson's Apocalytpo. I have heard there was some debate about whether the Carthaginians really actually did sacrifice children as they were believed to do on by the Romans but I wonder if both the ancient Romans and Carthaginians would react with revulsion, despite their barbarities, at the amount of killing and abortions that go on. I know that the tribe that the missionary Elisabeth Elliot worked with, the Auca Indians in South American, were very violent with something like a %60 death by homicide rate for all adults, but they reacted with horror when they heard of the barbarity of civilized man's bombing and killing large amounts of people without meeting them personally. It seems that we get the sense that if it is done in clinics with Doctorates it must not be evil.
Keep in mind that the Auca Indians may have had a high homicide rate, but theirs was a warrior culture, and faceless killings were considered taboo. I can't condone their actions (murder of any stripe is wrong excepting when done in self defense or in defense of another, by my book), but I can accept their culture a lot better than I accept modern American culture of facelessness. PETA members and radical anti-abortionists who hurl fire bombs at people don't have the pleasure of seeing their handiwork up front and personal. How many people do you think would be willing to condone some of the bunk we put up with (such as the clinical murders performed by MDs we have in the US) if they had to experience the whole thing face-to-face from beginning to end? How many people can have an innocent person sitting in front of him tied up and be willing to behead that person? The radicals will always be like that, but the majority wouldn't have the stomach for it... unless we've desensitized ourselves to the point of apathy. I hadn't thought of that possibility...
But the Carthaginians were thick-skinned b*st*rds. Anyone who can burn infants alive for crop help from the gods probably isn't going to blink a whole lot at bioincinerating some formless embryos in petri dishes.
As G.K. Chesterton says about the Carthaginians, they were highly civilized. It was as if a bunch of men in top hats (the dress clothes of his day) turned up to church every Sunday to watch a baby being roasted.
I don't think we're so much getting worse than the wicked pre-Christian socies as moving back to them. How many Spartan children were left to die on the mountainsides because they were imperfect?
Lydia -
Desensitized to the point of apathy, and then since baby murders were "institutionalized," it all seemed okay to the guys in the tophats watching the baby roasting.
Which of course is exactly what we're doing right now. Look at the Dutch - they had a show (I beleive this was Holland, so shout if I'm wrong) called "Death by Request" showing a person being euthanized from beginning to end. ...'course it offended the vast majority of the people in the country, but still.
The world is full of sick people who keep trying to make everyone else feel comfortable with their sicknesses. We're coming full circle. Isn't the New Roman Empire due for it's fall?
Lydia -
Desensitized to the point of apathy, and then since baby murders were "institutionalized," it all seemed okay to the guys in the tophats watching the baby roasting.
Which of course is exactly what we're doing right now. Look at the Dutch - they had a show (I beleive this was Holland, so shout if I'm wrong) called "Death by Request" showing a person being euthanized from beginning to end. ...'course it offended the vast majority of the people in the country, but still.
The world is full of sick people who keep trying to make everyone else feel comfortable with their sicknesses. We're coming full circle. Isn't the New Roman Empire due for it's fall?
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