Boston Globe Misses Real Reason Faustman Criticized
This is a nice profile of Denise Fuastman, who cured diabetic mice with a combination of substances, including spleen stem cells. As the story notes, she was severely criticized, but look at the nonsense reason the paper gives for those attacks:
In 2001, Faustman said it was possible to cure type 1 diabetes in mice with a two-step treatment that blocked their immune systems from destroying their insulin-making beta cells; new beta cells then grew back, and the mice were no longer diabetic. After her announcement, many in the medical community--including some of her own Harvard colleagues--lashed out at her findings, and accused her of cruelly raising the expectations of those suffering from the disease.Oh please get real. Remember the unbelievable hype at that time over the CURES! CURES! CURES! coming from embryonic stem cell research crowd without receiving harsh criticism from "the scientists?" Right, I missed those attacks, too.
The reason "the scientists" attacked Faustman had to do with the potential that the cure could involve adult stem cells. As things turned out, the treatment apparently doesn't require stem cells at all. But the worry about giving "false hope" was never in the minds of her critics. They were worried that she provided true hope with the "wrong" kind of stem cells and that her research would provide political ammunition for those who supported President Bush's embryonic stem cell funding policy.
Labels: Denise Faustman
posted by Wesley J. Smith @ 7:04 AM
3 Comments
3 Comments:
Um
That's not how I remember it. But then I have a faulty memory at the best of times.
If you have them, I'd be interested in sources for this concern by the scientists about the use of the wrong stem cells.
Um Bernard, do you really not remember at all the advocates for embryonic stem cell research/ cloning, media pundits, the scientists and politicians saying that adult stem cells were the wrong way to go, they had limited application, weren't as versatile as embryonic ones, that funding for ASCR undermined ESCR funding and that embryonic stem cells were far superior and that pretty much every scientist worth her or his salt (the real scientists) thinks ESCR is the way to go and that the rest of us are just a bunch of nutcase Luddite backwoods, rightwing fudnamentalists who oppose this for religious and political purposes and who could care less that people like you or my diabetic amputee dad ever get well? Was that all an illusion? You were at ground zero of all this in MA. You had to have heard some of that.
Don's right, Bernard and your memory is poor. After the NIH approved Faustman's approach for human trials, the Juv. Diab. Research Foundation REFUSED to fund it. Yet, at about the same time it poured $1 million into the Prop. 71 campaign to establish a const. right to clone in CA and fund ESCR and SCNT with (my) borrowed money--even though those technologies were years from being able to help diabetes patients and Faustman's had a potential for near term success. As a consequence, Lee Ioccoca had to beat the bushes for funding. Case in point!
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