The Adult Answer

Adult stem cells, that is, according to Michael Fumento on National Review Online. If adult stem cells are the answer, then what's the question? The question is, "Which type of stem cell has actually provided workable therapies for human diseases?" Those diseases even include primary paralysis due to spinal-cord injury, the disease that plagued Christopher Reeve with complications of which he ultimately died. (Believe it or not, adult stem cells have already helped the lame to walk, and much of the funding for that research came from Reeve's own foundation! Yet he continue to hype embryonic stem cells until the day he died, and John Edwards even made it a campaign issue.) The article is very rich in hyperlinks, so that you can check out for yourself everything that Mr. Fumento says. Among his findings is one that I consider the key: that fourteen types of adult stem cells are now know, and those fourteen together just might hold the solution for re-creating any other type of cell a patient might need. This, while embryonic stem cells are so incredibly difficult to control that all they do is produce teratomas (literally, "monster tumors," or malignant tumors of cell types normally seen halfway or so through embryonic development) in rats.

I also have a few words about this article, which Mr. Fumento said "has some validity." No way. Its author, Christopher Mooney, is an atheist, as his on-line column in Skeptical Inquirer clearly shows. And furthermore, that column contains some of the most fantastic (in the negative sense) submissions that I have ever seen--and anyone who brought this kind of stuff into a medical journal club session would be booted out by whoever could stop rolling on the floor laughing long enough to give him the boot. Here is one example--I mean, come on! Either a Hollywood movie is a stupid movie or it isn't! This other example clearly shows that Mooney is only skeptical about things that don't fit his particular fancies.

Mooney's biggest problem, however, is that to him, the imprimatur of presently reputable scientific journals is gold. It isn't. (And again, he could never publish half his stuff if those journals really lived up to the standards they pretend to have.) The editors of those journals are fallible human beings, like him or me or anyone else. They have their agendae. And I can personally attest that those agendae are anti-God and anti-freedom; they plump for a techno-cratic elite that would shock Aldous Huxley, and they commonly act as though they already are that elite. So when he says that if the "Christian fundamentalists" keep up trying to play scientist when they are not scientists, they will only marginalize themselves--well, I won't say that he has it backwards. I will say that all that will happen is that a scientific counter-establishment will arise and will be at war with the old establishment from now to the Rapture. And shrill denunciations like those of Chris Mooney will not help the old establishment's cause.