That precious moment when our priest sings:

Thy Resurrection O Christ our Saviour-
The angels in Heaven sing-
Enable us on earth-
To glorify Thee in purity of heart!

This is the moment when darkness turns to Light and I anticipate it every year.

Thank you for a good post -

Christ is Risen!
Indeed He is Risen!
the handmaid,
Mary-Leah

Only comment I can make is that I haven’t seen anything that indicates he is actively pursing the VP nomination- in fact, just the opposite. People can’t help it if other people talk about them… just like our Gov. Sarah Palin up here.

POSTSCRIPT: Ran out of time on my lunch break to write more, but wanted to point out that Steve’s objections are of the sort that are part of the normal, legitimate and CIVIL give-and-take of politics as it ought to be practiced. I had never even heard of Bobby Jindal when I wrote the original post- I wasn’t taking a pro or con position towards him one way or the other. What I was noting was the raging, venomous, irrational hatred and racism displayed by liberals when a “person of color” affiliates with the “wrong” (i.e., conservative) side of the political spectrum. You can almost hear them choking on their spittle as they scream “Don’t y’all know you colored people belong to US??? Get back over here where you belong!”

The “New Scientist” article is subscription only, so couldn’t read that one. I notice that the quote says that “ESC’s remain the gold standard for pluripotent cells”, not the gold standard for therapeutic applications. To focus on pluripotency is to miss the point- and reinforces the point that ESC research is mainly about solving intriguing questions in pure (vs. applied) science.

Pluripotency has a high “cool”factor, it’s “sexy science”, but it appears that it is increasingly irrelevant in the face of advances in ASC successes.

And the other link to the blog post seemed to say “Look! We’ve finally succeeded in doing something that ASC already does!”

As a consequence, of the $607 million of NIH funding provided in 2005 for stem cell research, only $39 million was used for human embryonic stem cells. And then you wonder why embryonic stem cell research isn’t yielding amazing results…

There is an editorial in the current issue of New Scientist, titled ‘Still no substitute for embryonic stem cells’ , which says: “ESCs remain the gold standard for pluripotent cells” (link: http://www.newscientist.com/channel/opinion/mg19826542.700-editorial-still-no-substitute-for-embryonic-stem-cells.html). This is a common opinion among researchers - ASCs are easier to get funding for, and easier to get consent for, but ESCs have the potential to be so much better.

It appears either my html isn’t working, or it isn’t allowed, but the link I tried to give was this one from my blog: http://hplusbiopolitics.wordpress.com/2008/02/22/embryonic-stem-cells-can-cure/

It looks like you meant to create a hyperlink in your last paragraph- the phrase “cure diseases in animal models” looks like a hyperlink, but doesn’t connect anywhere. Can you correct that?

Even so, it seems a curious phrase- animal “models”. What are those? Presumably not actual animals, just animal “models”? When will cures in actual animals occur? Not to mention actual human beings?

Well, in Mr. Fumento’s article he quotes a British fertility expert (and ESC researcher) Professor Lord Robert Winston saying in a 2005 lecture, “I am not entirely convinced that embryonic stem cells will, in my lifetime, and possibly anybody’s lifetime for that matter, be holding quite the promise that we desperately hope they will”. He then let the cat out of the bag when he followed up with this explanation: “One of the problems is that in order to persuade the public that we must do this work, we often go rather too far in promising what we might achieve”, i.e., in order to persuade the public, we deceive the public.

The roadblocks to the applicability of ESC’s are biological, not financial. “But give ESC research enough money and we can- (eventually)- solve the biology!” it’s advocates say.

Meanwhile, ASC’s are used today in over 70 treatments or cures, are being tested in over 1300 human clinical trials, and more trials are being approved monthly. So the argument sounds like this- if we take away enough money from what works now, and pour it into what doesn’t work, we might/ perhaps/ possibly/ surely ought to be able some day to make it do… something wonderful.

That does not sound at all rational, so again I ask- whose science is more “faith-based”?

Under “Have human embryonic stem cells been used successfully to treat any human diseases yet?” the answer clearly points the finger at President Bush’s restrictions on federal funding.

I mean, we know that ESCs can cure diseases in animal models. Surely if the researchers in the US and Europe had federal funding at their disposal, they could have cured many human patients by now.