I Was Right About Diabetes Story: No Big Headlines, Only Muted Coverage
Yesterday, I wrote about a diabetes human trial using adult stem cells in which some of the patients were able to go off insulin. I predicted at the time that it wouldn't make big time headlines--as would happen if the exact same achievement happened with human patients using embryonic stem cells: From my blog:
We know that if this were an embryonic stem cell success, the headlines would swamp reportage of the financial crisis. But this is the wrong kind of stem cell success, so I expect, at most, muted coverage.
That's precisely what it received, muted coverage. New York Times; crickets chirping. Ditto, the Washington Post. And ditto again, the L.A. Times. No Boston Globe. No San Francisco Chronicle. Some on-line coverage in health and science publications. CNN had a small story. Time did too, not big though. Just what I expected. Hey, it did make the Times of India!
You see, successful human treatments don't count as news if they are from adult stem cells. That doesn't fit the media narrative that ESCR is the future. That is why a prospective Geron ESC human trial that might or might not work, got more coverage than these stories of an actual major success did put together.
Pathetic, biased, non journalism. Just pathetic.
Labels: Stem Cell Research. Media Bias.
posted by Wesley J. Smith @ 10:22 PM
27 Comments
27 Comments:
Again
The shameless effort to pit ASCr against ESCr is prolife propaganda.
And you are a fire hose of boo hoos Welsey. Pathetic indeed.
So CNN, TIME, BBC, ABC, Bloomberg, Forbes are not major media outlets?
Never mind that this is not a cure for diabetes and has not received FDA approval.
Of course if they can reduce insulin shots in the future thats wonderful, but using the good news to smear other good news is terrible.
Similarly, Lets compare that to media coverage of another massive breakthrough using Embryonic Stem Cells from left over IVF announced in the last few weeks. The ability to create an endless supply of disease free O- blood created from ESCs. In effect, a never ending blood supply for those in need of transfusions.
"The academics expect to make the first transfusions of synthetic blood into human volunteers in three years."
http://www.walesonline.co.uk/news/wales-news/2009/04/16/professor-marc-turner-is-leading-team-who-are-creating-large-amounts-of-synthetic-blood-91466-23397024/ (Not exactly the Washington Post is it)
Well it was covered by CBS - Discover magazine and hmm not much else I found, so lets feign outrage over this in attempt to hijack science as a political tool!
A fine example of Biased Non Journalism indeed!
Dark: I said there would be muted coverage and not headlines. I was right. I said it is an early human trial, not in the clinic with FDA approval. What a poor fallback.
But your "fire hose of boo hoos" was a nice quip. I laughed.
ABC (short for A Bunch of Crap) led with the Geron story in late January on WORLD NEWS TONIGHT. The contrast between the coverage of that story and that for these ASC stories is rather blatant, making those who deny the existence of the stem-cell blockade look rather silly.
Was it like this before there were journalism schools?
Westley, your comment shows a very thin understanding of the research you report on. It is true that type-1 diabetics are not very excited about this research, but it has nothing to do with the type of stem cells used.
This research is very dangerous for the patient. It basically shuts down your entire immune system, and then "reboots" it with the new adult stem cells. It is (by far) the most successful type-1 diabetes cure research out there. But it is also (by far) the most dangerous, and the research with the most side effects.
You can see my summary of Burt's research here:
http://cureresearch4type1diabetes.blogspot.com/search/label/Burt
(the second blog entry is probably the more interesting one, from your point of view). Obviously, I'm writing from a type-1 diabetes cure point of view, not a theological point of view about the morality of different types of stem cell research.
Joshua Levy
Joshua Levy: It is never a good idea to claim that I have a "thin" understanding about what I write.
I pointed that very thing out in a comment to the original post about this study, to wit: " I think they take out the adult stem cells, destroy the immune system with chemo, and then inject the adult cells so the body's immune system "reboots. Type 1 is an auto immune disease. They do the same thing with MS.
It is risky for a period of time when the immune system is down and the patient has to be in isolation."
The media would have reported this big had it been ESCR, and the usual diabetes groups would have been all atwitter.
Also Joshua Levy you reveal your own ideological predilictions by calling objections to the instrumental treatment of human life "theological." I suggest you have a very big axe of your own that you are grinding.
So you understand that the research is very risky. But when the media isn't excited about it, you you blame an anti-adult stem cell bias, rather than the more obvious and reasonable anti-risky research bias. It makes perfect sense to downplay a highly risky "cure" that might be worse than the disease, and that is exactly what the media has done. But as part of your conspiracy theory, you need to ascribe the downplay to anti-adult stem cell bias.
As for your objections to the term "theological", I understand your pain. The whole goal of your blog is to portray theological arguments as something else. But most of your arguments boil down to religious opinions about when life begins, and how people should treat animals, and what medical decisions people should be forced to make (compared to which ones they should be allowed to make), and so on. You dress them up in different words, but you end up with the same basic arguments.
In particular, your whole argument with stem cells boils down to when does life begin. If the Pope is wrong, and life doesn't begin at conception, then "instrumental treatment of human life" doesn't come into play. Your religious belief is the gatekeeper to the argument.
In a nutshell, you believe that if we can cure a disease using ESC we should not do it, but if we can cure it using ADC, then we should. That's a religious argument, no matter how you dress it up with long words.
As a second example, you believe that if someone walks up to a doctor and says "I want anti-pain" medicine, that doctor should give it. (Because the person is a person and not a slave, and if they want treatment they should get it.) On the other hand if that very same person says "I want medicine to kill myself", then suddenly the doctor should say "no". (Has the person suddenly become a slave, unworthy of controlling their own body? Of course not: they merely want to do something that violates your religion.)
ESCR is very risky, tumors, tissue rejection, etc.-- and the media went nuts over the prospect of the upcoming Geron study.
Getting off insulin is huge. Stopping MS in its tracks (using the same approach) is huge. Paraplegics and quadriplegics having feeling restored with nasal stem cells (not dangerous) is huge, and it got zero coverage. If it had been ESC, you would still hear the echo from the headlines that would have been generated.
No, its an ethical argument based on my perception that it is wrong to use human life as an object and an instrumentality. Religion has nothing to do with it. Plenty of non religious people--and I never argue religion--hold to that view. For example, the athiest Nat Hentoff. Hard to accuse him of foisting relgion on a secular society.
It is your prejudice and presumptions that blind you to the difference.
You still haven't explained how (except through religious belief) an embryo is "human life" at all.
As for the ESC vs. ASC, are you claiming that we know that ESC is always dangerous and we know ASC is always safe? That would be untrue: We know neither.
And you don't want to talk about my last paragraph at all.
Joshua Levy: We have dealt with that matter at lenght here several times. I suggest you read an embryology text book. Do a research on the site in which I quote them. Good grief man, it is basic biology. You know, SCIENCE.
Levy: "The whole goal of your blog is to portray theological arguments as something else."
Joshua, please get thee to a science textbook. I can cite several that correctly state that human embryos are human beings. No religion required, Josh!
Presumably, you also believe that death-row inmates are not human beings, either -- except in the eyes of religion, since many religious people oppose capital punishment. Correlation is not cauation, Josh.
I claim that Wesley's beliefs are just catholic religious beliefs with different words used as justification. Westley calims that his arguments are based on science, and not catholic faith.
So Wesley, it would be easy to to prove this by just saying how your beliefs differ (functionally) from Catholic ones. Just point to a blog posting you have made that comes to a different conclusion than the catholic church on some matter of bioethics. Bioethics is a huge area, just show a previous posting where you come to a different decision that someone applying catholic teaching to the same problem.
bmmg39:
I'm sure there are science text books that say embryos are human beings. I would expect a science text written by a Catholic to say exactly that (for example).
The question is: is there a non religious argument that an embryo is a human? Or, put another way, name one attribute which embryos and humans share, but which nothing else (non-human) has? Or, put a third way, describe a test that when applied to embryos and humans gives the same answer, but when applied to anything else, gives a different answer. (Hint: don't use DNA, because dead bodies have the same DNA as live humans, and a corpse is surely not a human from a bioethical point of view.)
As for your death row argument, it is silly on many levels. Most obviously, people on death row are certainly human. They are simply people sentenced to death. It's not like they are being put to death because they are not human. They are being put to death because our legal system says they should be. Another obvious difference is that people are on death row because of our legal system, not because of either science or religion specifically.
Joshua: I am not Catholic. But that is irrelevant.
My beliefs are based on ethics. I insist that the science be accurately stated so that an rational ethical analysis can be engaged in.
I also agree with Nat Hentoff on most of these issues. He's a proud atheist. Or is he a secret Catholic too pushing the Church's teaching with different words?
From my perspective, I don't care if one is Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Buddhist, agnostic, neo Darwinist, or animist. I believe in human rights and human equality and understand that without human exceptionalism, those goals will never be achieved. Call me a Martin Luther King liberal, if you must label me.
You are the one obsessed with religion, not me.
I never said that you were Catholic, I said your ideas were. (But I think we can both agree that this is not important to the argument, because it is your ideas that matter.)
So back to the question you have not (can not?) answer:
Is there a non religious argument that an embryo is a human? Or, put another way, name one attribute which embryos and humans share, but which nothing else (non-human) has? Or, put a third way, describe a test that when applied to embryos and humans gives the same answer, but when applied to anything else, gives a different answer. (Hint: don't use DNA, because dead bodies have the same DNA as live humans, and a corpse is surely not a human from a bioethical point of view.)
Joshua Levy
A digression on styles of argument.
I was thinking about why Wesley's arguments seem so empty to me, and I think I have hit upon an important difference in argument styles. Wesley's arguments tend to focus on words, and their exact meanings. So he is proud of his "ethics" but hates being called "religious". To him "personhood" and "humanhood" are different, and this difference is important! When someone refers to a bunch of cells as a pre-embryo, rather than an embryo (as he thinks is proper) this is a big deal to him.
But to me, that is all arguing about words; splitting hairs of meaning. For me, the important issues are substantive and functional, not terminology.
So if someone shows me eight cells stuck together, and a person and asks me are they both human beings? I don't care if the cells are called an embryo or a pre-embryo. I care what they have in common with the person. The person has thoughts. Does the embryo? The person has a complex body with many organs and specialized tissue. Does the group of cells? A person interacts with their environment is various ways, does this group of cells interact with it's environment in similar ways? And so on.
It's an argument based on the substance of things, not the names of things.
So earlier I said that Wesley's arguments were religious (Catholic, specifically), and suggested that he disprove it by showing differences between his conclusions and Catholic ones. (A substantive difference.) He hasn't done that, because to him the important thing is the words used. As long as his words are different than the Catholic words, his arguments are different; even if the substance is the same.
Joshua Levy
Joshua: You are half right and totally wrong. The words are important to me because without precise definitions and clear distinctions, moral analysis becomes impossible. There is no such thing as principle. All you have is your feelings of the moment or your intuitive impressions, or what you perceive serves your own interests.
How convenient. It isn't substantive, it is justifying exploitation by narrowing the field of moral concern. Personhood theory is oppression, by definition, by which the strong rationalize exploiting and killing the weak. That will always serve you because you think you are the strong. But someday, you could come to regret it because a brick falling on your head and you become the weak. Then, why should you be allowed to keep your own liver?
In that way you never have to actually choose the right over your own individual welfare or desires. Instead, what is right is always what serves your perecptions of your group. It represents, no offense, so much of what is going wrong today. Talk about thin. Talk about shallow. Expediency is unnourishing gruel.
I think some things are right and wrong and the way to find whether a particular plan of action or technology is right or wrong is to that understand accurately what it is about. Thus an eight celled human organism matters because it is human. That is what is fundamental, not the word. I insist on the word because those who would exploit that embryo refuse to deal factually with what it is. They obfuscate and dissemble. And such dishonesty is profoundly disrespectful of democratic discourse and arrogant in that, with a smirk, its proponents seek to pull the wool over the eyes of people they think are less then themselves.
In this regard, I recall a SCIENTIST I once debated who said embryonic stem cell research was just fine because embryos don't have fingers and toes. What insipid nonscientific nonsense. It might well be fine, but not because of fingers and toes and emotional reactions or the lack thereof.
Words are important because they are the only way we have to work through what is supremely substantive. They are the only ways we have to establish and follow PRINCIPLE.
And the Catholic Church probably does agree with me on most matters, and I agree with it on things bioethical such as assisted suicide and cloning. So what? I don't take positions to please the CC, and it sure isn't in the business of pleasing me. In fact, I castigated the Catholic Bishops of Texas for their position on a futile care bill in National Review Online. Look it up.
Jushua: It is basic science. A human embryo is a human. It isn't Martian. A sheep embryo is a sheep. A lion embryo is a lion. It isn't metaphysical, it is biological. Not controversial except by those who wish to make it so for reasons that are not scientific in the sense of determining what it is.
In other posts I have quoted embryology text books at length to answer your question. It is there for your perusal.
"I'm sure there are science text books that say embryos are human beings. I would expect a science text written by a Catholic to say exactly that (for example)."
Nice attempt at a retreat.
"The question is: is there a non religious argument that an embryo is a human?"
I just provided that.
"Or, put a third way, describe a test that when applied to embryos and humans gives the same answer, but when applied to anything else, gives a different answer. (Hint: don't use DNA, because dead bodies have the same DNA as live humans, and a corpse is surely not a human from a bioethical point of view.)"
A human embryo is a complete organism, something that cannot be said for a human hair, sperm cell, or piece of human tissue, all of which are PARTS of OTHER organisms.
"As for your death row argument, it is silly on many levels. Most obviously, people on death row are certainly human."
How can you say that? There are -- [gasp] -- CATHOLICS who think death-row inmates shouldn't be killed. That means that their personhood, according to your viewpoint, is just a silly religioius viewpoint with no scientific evidence.
Wesley wrote: "And the Catholic Church probably does agree with me on most matters, and I agree with it on things bioethical such as assisted suicide and cloning. So what? I don't take positions to please the CC, and it sure isn't in the business of pleasing me. In fact, I castigated the Catholic Bishops of Texas for their position on a futile care bill in National Review Online. Look it up."
I looked up your NRO article, and you disagreed with those Bishops specifically because you felt they were not toeing the Catholic line. Far from proving me wrong, it reinforces my case: your beliefs are all the official beliefs of the catholic church. There are no differences.
Now why is this important? Because bioethics is a big field, with many details. I'm sure you'd agree that a complete bioethical world view includes 20 or 30 major policies and 100s of smaller ones. And you can't provide a single example where your's differs from the Catholic church's. Now you can claim that it is just pure chance that your (supposedly non-religiious) logic has gotten you to the exact same place as the catholic church for everyone one of those 20-30 major moral questions, and everyone one of those 100s of more detailed questions: but it's silly.
If you were a ethics professor, and some kid turned in the exact same paper as a kid from last year (or last millennium :-). And the second kid said "I didn't copy it! I came up with the exact same theory completely independently. I came up with the exact same major decisions and all the same details ones on my own!" You'd know he had copied. Just like you, that kid would claim to the end that he independently came up with the exact same ideas: right down to every detail. And just like that Professor, I'd know he had copied.
The fact that you agree with the catholic church not in one or two areas, but in every area, right down to every detail shows that you are not coming up with your own theories, you are repackaging their's. Changing the individual words, but never the overall meanings.
So again I ask you: name a biomedial ethical issue in your blog, where you disagree with the official teachings of the Catholic church, in any detail.
Joshua Levy
bgmm39: you still haven't answered by question: "Or, put a third way, describe a test that when applied to embryos and humans gives the same answer, but when applied to anything else, gives a different answer. (Hint: don't use DNA, because dead bodies have the same DNA as live humans, and a corpse is surely not a human from a bioethical point of view.)"
As far as an embryo being a "complete organism" I'm not sure that it is. It certainly can't survive on it's own. It's eight cells do not have any of the organs a person would have; nor does it have any of the thinking power. In what way is it "complete". A dead body is also a "complete organism" by your definition, is it not?
Remember, my question has two parts: you must unite embryo and person, while at the same time excluding non-people.
You seem to be trying to do a name-shift: embryos and people are the same because they are both "complete organisms", so what is your definition of a "complete organism". Would a dead body count? How about a living person with one lung removed? How about a living person with no kidneys, or a pancreas that doesn't work? Are they "complete organisms" in your mind? An embryo will not survive without another person (the mother), yet it is a "Complete Organism"? Sounds like names games to me.
Joshua Levy
Wesley, did you really write this: "It is basic science. A human embryo is a human. It isn't Martian. A sheep embryo is a sheep. A lion embryo is a lion."
When I first saw that, I thought it was someone trying to embarrass you by forging posts. That's not an argument. That's a kid throwing a tantrum.
You also said "In other posts I have quoted embryology text books at length to answer your question. It is there for your perusal."
Which other posts? You've made 100s of blog entries in the last few years, so you need to put in a more specific reference than that. I'll be happy to read your previous work, and I don't think you should repeat yourself, but there's no way to find it without a more specific reference.
Joshua Levy
Joshua: This is silly. But to satisfy you: Although I don't get much into reproductive medical ethics, I have written in support of IVF if it is done with proper regulations, such as they do in Italy, e.g., only make two or three embryos at at time and implant all that are made, to there are no leftovers.
The CC, as I understand it, belives that IVF is an intrinsic evil. I don't.
Johsua: To say that a lion embryo is of the lion species and that a human embryo is of the human species is hardly a tantrum. It is a statement of biological fact.
The blog has a "search" function. Have at it.
I searched for "IVR" in your blog search function before I asked you. I returned nothing (which I assume is a bug, since you obviously do comment on it.) I'm using the field in the upper left corner of your blog.
I've looked through many parts of your blog, and found three postings on IVR. Two of them objected to the specific IVR you were commenting on (and did not say when IVR would be OK). The third was comment on the Octomom pointing out the double-talk on some others commenting on her case. That did not say where IVR would be OK either.
So, with your search feature not working, and the three IVR blog entries I found not supporting what you say here: why don't you tell me exactly which blog entry disagrees with Catholic teachings?
Joshua Levy
I'm also still interested in the substance of your argument about embryos being people.
As far as I can tell your argument boils down to this: Wesley Smith and many other people use the same word "human" to refer to embryos and also to people. To us they are both humans. Therefore, embryos should not be killed to help others, for the same reasons that adults (or any other people) should not.
It's an argument based on word definitions, that everyone knows no everyone agrees with. It's circular: Why are embryos the same as adults? Because we use the same word ("human") to describe them. Why do you use the same word? Because they are the same! Round and round you go in a circle of words. It doesn't matter who defines the words: scientists or theologians. It's still a circular word argument.
I'm still interested in hearing your response to my challenge:
name one attribute which embryos and humans share, but which nothing else (non-human) has? Or, put a third way, describe a test that when applied to embryos and humans gives the same answer, but when applied to anything else, gives a different answer. (Hint: don't use DNA, because dead bodies have the same DNA as live humans, and a corpse is surely not a human from a bioethical point of view.)
Joshua Levy
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