Wanker science: stem cell edition

In the conservative mind, whatever might be perceived as a "liberal" issue is greeted with immediate contrarian hyperventilating which often results in either a complete block of funding (when Republicans are hold majorities in Congress) or reduction of funding to such a level that whatever is being considered cannot succeed. Once there is even the tiniest evidence that the "conservative" alternative is working, they roll out the spinmeisters to hype how great their way of doing things is and how misguided those "liberals" were in thinking that their plan would ever succeed.

This is true for any number of issues, like mass transit vs highways, high-speed rail vs airline travel, etc, and is also true for the issue of federally funding stem cell research. Federal funding for embryonic stem cell reserach was blocked based on dubious ethical grounds that on the one hand stated it's akin to murder, but on the other hand didn't ban it outright.

Without federal funding, the basic research on stem cell therapies--adult or emryonic--simply is not done since private money is quite risk-averse when it comes to paying for cutting-edge science which may or may not lead to cures a long time down the road. Translational research--that which takes the basic research almost to the point of the first clinical trials is also quite risky for private investment, and often just not done by pharmaceutical corporations alone. The depth and breadth of federally-funded academic science working in conjunction with private industry makes translational research more effective. Both of those early steps pretty much require people to be paid to do things that might fail in coming up with a cure. That's not to say that corporations don't engage in either basic or translation research, it's that the risks of pumping money into experiments that might never actually produce cures is far too great for corporations to take, so they limit that type of research and depend on federally funded research to take those first tentative steps towards potential cures. It's in the clinical trials phase where private (corporate) money is most involved and federal money is least required since at this stage, the risks are relative low, though not absent.

So here we are, after years of federal funding going only to adult stem cell research and lookee here, those experiments are starting to yield results indicative of possible cures:

The results show that insulin-dependent diabetics can be freed from reliance on needles by an injection of their own stem cells.

That's great, and it shows how when money is spent on something, it sometimes actually gets results that are useful to people! What it does not show is that embryonic stem cells are somehow inferior to adult stem cells and blocking their funding was therefore justified. Captain Ed:

What has changed since lasty year? Majority control of Congress has shifted to the Democrats, and they perceive Bush to be even weaker than he was when he issued his first and only veto of his presidency. The science hasn't advanced for hEsc development at all. Researchers still have not implemented a single therapy from embryonic stem cells. One of the proponents of the bill, the firm Geron, says it will start the first US human tests of hEsc-based therapy "soon".

This time, the Senate will allow an alternative bill to get a floor vote. Sponsored by Norm Coleman and Johnny Isakson, it proposes to use stem cells from clinically dead embryos, hoping to bypass the ethical and moral dilemmas that have kept hEsc research from getting federal funds. Some researchers scoff at the proposal, saying that such cells would almost certainly be suspect even if still alive when extracted, but Coleman and Isakson argue that the alternative will never pass into law anyway.

Perhaps that's because stem-cell research continues to show that hEsc is not as promising as other techniques.

Uhm...no. Perhaps that's because there has been asymmetric funding favoring one alternative over the other. For this, and because Captain Ed is a respected wanker (unlike this goofball whose musings on the topic are way too stupid to quote. Even here, and that's saying something!), he wins today's "excellence in wingnut/wanker science" award. Congratulations Captian Ed!