Going to the Dogs? #26 in Our "Anti-Boredom" Packets Is Out

Alas, the quarantines in the senior care facilities continue.

And, as long as this sad state of affairs goes on, we will keep creating our "Anti-Boredom" Packets for the residents who live there...and anyone else who needs a lift.

Last Friday, our first action after arriving home from our Colorado climbing trip was to send out #26 in our series. You can take a look at it (and all the others) on this page of the Vital Signs Ministries website.

And yes, inside #26 you will find 2 "dog photo quizzes" (with answers) that will give you a few smiles and memories. Here's one of them:

Envying Sinners? You'd Better Stop It.

“Do not let your heart envy sinners, but live in the fear of the Lord always. Surely there is a future, and your hope will not be cut off.” (Proverbs 23:17,18 -- NASB)

The teacher of Proverbs has an important exhortation here, one that acknowledges the strong allure of sin, yet which also urges the man of God to deny that temptation by turning instead to a healthy, joyful, and forward-looking trust in God. This is an ever-timely warning, one that can provide great help to us in our ongoing battles with sin’s deceptive enticements.

Let’s break down a few elements of this exhortation.

1) Sin begins in the heart -- our inner attitudes and affections.  The overt acts of sin have their start inside us. (Remember 1 John 1:13-16 and Matthew 5.) Walking in holiness is much more than avoiding the deeds of robbery, adultery, cursing, murder, or exploitation. It is not enough to avoid “acting out” sin. The battleground is, in point of fact, our minds.  It is there that that we are either victorious or defeated, pure or corrupt, pleasing to God or disappointing to Him. Thus, the initial warning of Proverbs 23:17: “do not let your heart envy sinners.”  The basic danger we face is not murdering someone, it’s hating them. It is not hooking up with someone who is not your spouse, but mentally lusting for them. It is not breaking into your neighbor’s home to steal, but being unsatisfied and ungrateful with your own income and possessions. Again, sin begins in the heart and so that is where the Lord commands us to be on our closest guard against it.

2) Do we really envy sinners?  We don’t usually think of our struggles with evil in this way.  We are more likely to think of temptation as being an idea or some kind of evil force…perhaps some line of attack from the devil himself.  But this proverb is just one of the many Scriptures that show us temptation can arise from our attitudes towards other people – even unbelievers.  Their beauty and youth.  Their health and mobility.  Their affluence, eloquence, social standing, relationships, freedom, success.  When we allow our eyes to stray from the Lord, from His Word, from the many and lovely gifts He has given us, and from our heavenly future (more on that momentarily), and start comparing our lot with others, we’re in spiritual trouble. We are likely to end up dissatisfied (at times even despairing). We complain and blame God for whatever we feel lacking. We give way to envy.  But God wants to kindly teach us that there is absolutely no future in this.  No happiness.  No spiritual growth. No heavenly reward. So, let’s listen carefully to His wisdom and choose a different course.

3)  “Live in the fear of the Lord always.” Yes, there is another option.  Instead of letting our hearts be filled with dissatisfaction, ingratitude, and envy towards sinners, our hearts can be filled with the Holy Spirit as we live in the fear of God. Now, you’ve often heard that when the Bible speaks of fearing God, it actually means a solemn reverence for Him. And that’s true. But it’s not the whole truth. A comprehensive study of the Bible’s teaching on this matter reveals that while “the fear of the Lord” certainly includes that sense of solemn reverence towards God, it also involves ongoing trust, gratitude, love, awe, obedience, encouragement, comfort and…yes, an honest fear of the repercussions of sin in our lives.  Make no mistake, God is a jealous God Who disciplines His own.  So be sure to behave yourselves as heavenly children. Honor God with a life of faithful obedience to His Word. As you do so, the temptation to envy sinners will lose its appeal. So, delight yourself in the Lord.  Find in Him your joy, your satisfaction, your purpose, and your strength. And, in God’s divine irony, once your focus is on Him, you can properly see others – not as people to envy, but as people to serve, pray for, and be an example to.

4) Consider the future. There is, in 23:18, a marvelous postscript to the previous proverb.  God reminds us that there is another huge consideration in this matter; namely, the eternal consequences of our present battles with temptation and sin.  Those sinners we are sometimes prone to envy?  Their end is judgment and an eternal separation from God and all His delights.  But, in astonishing contrast, the people of God have a sure hope -- a word also translated “expectation” And that sure hope, that guaranteed expectation of believers is a full redemption of mind, body, relationships, and even the physical world in which they will live forever with Christ  And that hope will not be cut off. But the wicked?  That’s a whole different story. He has no portion at all in this.  He is cast out defeated, wanting, and alone…eternally. So why envy sinners? There’s no logic or value in doing so.  Oh no, it is much better to keep the big picture in mind and live in the fear of God: honoring Him, loving Him, and glorifying Him as we joyfully anticipate the grand future before us.

“Do not let your heart envy sinners, but live in the fear of the Lord always. Surely there is a future, and your hope will not be cut off.”  (Proverbs 23:17,18 -- NASB)

A Rainy Day Prayer

A Rainy Day Prayer
(DAH)

Prayers were prayed this morning,
Prayers in the driving rain,
Outside a horrid business
Where unborn babes are slain.

This place is a most cruel trap
Where fools are easily caught,
Where violence and lies live
But preborn kids do not.

The sky was dark. Thunder growled.
From the heights, lightening was thrown.
And heaven’s tears fell apace
To mingle with my own.

I know, of course, God’s judgment
Is but for a moment stayed.
And on the Great Day of Wrath
All accounts will be fully paid.

Yet God wants to hear honest prayers.
So I strike the same old drum.
Please rain truth and justice down,
And come, Lord Jesus, come.

Turn Off the Clowns!

Steer clear...way clear...of the creepy clowns of the old guard media. There is now a lot of honest, relevant, courageous journalism going on in alternative media. So start availing yourself of it.

And turn off the clowns!

(For examples, I encourage you to check the compilation posts that show up here on Vital Signs Blog every few days.)

“Will Embryonic Stem Cells Ever Cure Anything?”

“Will Embryonic Stem Cells Ever Cure Anything?” is a skeptical headline which
you would expect to read in a conservative journal like the National Review or the Weekly Standard. However, it is a bit surprising to find it in the MIT Technology Review, in a profile of Douglas Melton, a Harvard stem cell scientist. 

From the article — “No field of biotechnology has promised more and delivered less in the way of treatments than embryonic stem cells. Only a handful of human studies has ever been carried out, without significant results. The cells, culled from IVF embryos, are capable of developing into any other tissue type in the body, and therefore promise an unlimited supply of replacement tissue. Sounds simple, but it hasn’t been.” (Michael Cook, Bioedge)

Recent Reads of Worth

Among the recent articles you may have missed (but shouldn't) are these:

* “Hillary Clinton Is No Champion of Religious Freedom” (Alexandra DeSanctis, National Review)

* “American journalism is collapsing before our eyes” (Michael Goodwin, New York Post)

* “Embryonic Stem Cell Hype --Was Hype” (Wesley J. Smith, National Review)

* “Nancy Pelosi: I support funding Planned Parenthood because I love babies” (Ben Johnson, Life Site News)

* “And the Darwin Award Goes to Leftists Who are Too Obsessed with Global Warming to Want to Reproduce” (John Hinderaker, Power Line)

* “Clinton releases tax returns; earned nearly $240M since leaving White House” (Stephen Dinan, Washington Times)

* “How Republicans Feed the Beast of Political Correctness” (John Fund, National Review)

* “3 Ways to Talk About Conservatism With a Liberal” (Beverly Hallberg, Daily Signal)

Yet More Breakthroughs Using Adult Stem Cells

Scientists at the University of Cambridge have successfully created 'mini-lungs' using stem cells derived from skin cells of patients with cystic fibrosis, and have shown that these can be used to test potential new drugs for this debilitating lung disease. 

The research is one of a number of studies that have used stem cells -- the body's master cells -- to grow 'organoids', 3D clusters of cells that mimic the behaviour and function of specific organs within the body. Other recent examples have been 'mini-brains' to study Alzheimer's disease and 'mini-livers' to model liver disease. Scientists use the technique to model how diseases occur and to screen for potential drugs; they are an alternative to the use of animals in research.

(Of course, this technique of using adult stem cells is also an alternative to the dead end exploitation of embryonic stem cells.)

Read more about this development in this Science Daily report, "Scientists grow 'mini-lungs' to aid study of cystic fibrosis."

And that's not all.

Just two days earlier, Science Daily published this remarkable story, “A Single-Cell Breakthrough: newly developed technology dissects properties of single stem cells.”

Researchers from the University of North Carolina School of Medicine have figured out a way to isolate and grow thousands elusive intestinal stem cells at one time, a high throughput technological advance that could give scientists the ability to study stem cell biology gastrointestinal disorders like never before.

[It's] a way to isolate and grow thousands elusive intestinal stem cells at one time, a high throughput technological advance that could give scientists the ability to study stem cell biology gastrointestinal disorders like never before.

The human gut is a remarkable thing. Every week the intestines regenerate a new lining, sloughing off the equivalent surface area of a studio apartment and refurbishing it with new cells. For decades, researchers have known that the party responsible for this extreme makeover were intestinal stem cells, but it wasn't until this year that Scott Magness, PhD, associate professor of medicine, cell biology and physiology, and biomedical engineering, figured out a way to isolate and grow thousands of these elusive cells in the laboratory at one time. This high throughput technological advance now promises to give scientists the ability to study stem cell biology and explore the origins of inflammatory bowel disease, intestinal cancers, and other gastrointestinal disorders...

Here is the rest of that article.

The ABCs of Adult Stem Cell Research

Adult stems cells come from a variety of sources and from people of all ages and races. Some common sources are bone marrow, skin and various other tissues such as the placenta, and umbilical cord blood. Because they are multipotent (able to turn into many different cell types), adult stem cells are very versatile. In 2007 scientific studies were even able to manipulate these stem cells into a pluripotentstage (iPS cells). Pluripotentcy is the ability to become every cell type in the body. Most importantly, there is no harm to the donor when adult stem cells are collected.

While much of the discussion going on in the stem cell debate is centered on embryonic stem cell research (ESCR), it is only adult stem cell research (ASCR) that has had any success in yielding treatments for various medical conditions. Furthermore, through iPS, adult stem cells can possess the flexibility of embryonic stem cells. For these reasons, there is no need to continue the life-destroying, unsuccessful, unethical, and unnecessary ESCR.

ASCR has produced treatments for more than 73 medical conditions, including brain cancer, breast cancer, type I diabetes, Parkinson’s disease, spinal cord injury, osteoporosis, and stroke damage. ASCR does not destroy human life, is ethical, and effective.

Embryonic stem cells have yet to provide any treatments. Dead-end ESCR usually results in uncontrollable, tumorous growths, and always destroys human life. Additionally, treatments would require the cloning of humans. 

In 2007, scientists were able to reprogram ordinary skin cells back to a pluripotent stage. These cells are called induced pluripotent stem cells (iPS cells). Since iPS cells come directly from the person who needs them, the threat of rejection problems no longer exists when using these reprogrammed adult stem cells. Adult stem cells have already been proven to be everything embryonic stem cells are only speculated to be; there is no need to continue with ESCR, which always destroys human life. 

(ASCR Basics, Minnesota Citizens Concerned for Life)

In Vitro Fertilization's Monstrous Secret

The research scientists (like those at the Yale School of Medicine who presented an intensive study a few years ago) tell us that around 80-85% of the embryos transferred during in vitro fertilization never make it to birth.

And since nearly two million kids have been born through IVF methods (as has been boasted by specialists in the field), that means that at least 10,000,000 embryos involved in IVF transfer didn't make it.

That's why I again post this brief article originally written for a Vital Signs' radio program. I'm afraid it is as relevant as ever.

What Happens to the "Extra" Embryos?

Amid all the talk about the ever-increasing availability of in vitro fertilization techniques, one issue is almost never mentioned; namely, what happens to all those extra embryos?

Well, to be frank, almost none of them make it.

Despite whatever warm feeling one might have towards infertile couples who are being helped to conceive a child through in vitro fertilization, it is important to understand this fact. In vitro fertilization generally creates multiple embryos to ensure a greater probability of success. And, yes, most of the little humans thus created...die. Either those embryos die as a result of the limitation of the female body to accommodate them or, in many instances, they are never implanted in the first place.

In the case of the embryos left over in the storage facilities of fertility clinics, different fates await them. They can, for instance, be frozen for some unspecified purpose in the distant future (the storage frequently being lethal itself) or they can be sold or donated to scientific research, a monstrous end from which none survive. Many IVF clinics merely incinerate the tiny guys and gals when they die, treating them no better than medical waste. Others, trying to be less crass, give the embryos some kind of funeral.

But no matter where the tiny bodies end up, they’re simply dead bodies, not living, growing human beings. And nothing, not even the heartbreak of being unable to naturally conceive children, can justify such brutal pragmatics.

Parrying the Blow

The wisest thing in the world is to cry out before you are hurt. It is no good to cry out after you are hurt; especially after you are mortally hurt. 

People talk about the impatience of the populace; but sound historians know that most tyrannies have been possible because men moved too late. It is often essential to resist a tyranny before it exists. 

It is no answer to say, with a distant optimism, that the scheme is only in the air. A blow from a hatchet can only be parried while it is in the air.

So wrote G.K. Chesterton in the opening paragraph of Eugenics and Other Evils (1922).

Tragically, the hatchet blow of humanist eugenics was not parried by the Church in those days when it could have been and so we now struggle against a "culture of death" that has become all too entrenched.

Yes, we will fight and fight gladly the terrible things the eugenics movement has started (abortion, the disrespect for the institution of family, an anti-child mentality, euthanasia, genetic engineering, and so on) but Chesterton's words remind us of how much more difficult is the struggle when God's people slumber through the first alarms.

Articles to Start the Week

* “Hillary Clinton Says Women’s Rights Can’t Progress Without Right to Abortion” (Stefano Gennarini, LifeNews.com)

* “US cites security more to censor, deny records” (Ted Birdis & Jack Gillum, AP)

The Obama administration has a way to go to fulfill its promises from Day 1 to become the most transparent administration in history.

More often than ever, the administration censored government files or outright denied access to them last year under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act, cited more legal exceptions it said justified withholding materials and refused a record number of times to turn over files quickly that might be especially newsworthy…

*  “The War on Julie Boonstra and other Obamacare cancer victims” (Henry Payne, NRO)

* “Fertility treatment pioneer calls for caution” (Shannon Roberts, Mercator)

The renowned Lord Winston of Hammersmith is in New Zealand at the moment visiting schools to educate students about infertility and the dangers of waiting too long to have children.  It’s interesting – and a little ironic - that the fertility expert, who pioneered IVF while it was still in its trial stages, is now warning that the rapid advance in reproductive technologies is making people too complacent about having children.  He argues that many such technologies are, in reality, not very effective and cannot beat nature or the ticking reproductive clock.   In fact he goes so far as to contend that it is often an immoral industry which provides a soul-destroying experience for young couples who are desperate to have a baby and are driven to do things like re-mortgage their houses to afford the hugely expensive treatment. 

* “Black Senior Forced to Choose: Obama or Jesus.” (Lloyd Marcus, American Thinker)

* “We overhauled U.S. health care — to insure 4.2 million people?” (Joseph Curl, Washington Times)

Still, the obvious question is: We changed the $2.7 trillion health care system to sign up 4.2 million people?…What’s more, it turns out many of those signing up to the program already had insurance. “Few uninsured Americans are gaining coverage under Obamacare,” CNN reported in early March. Just 27 percent of the enrollees were previously uninsured, according to a survey conducted in February by McKinsey & Co. To top it all off, reports have emerged that many of the enrollees are more elderly and more unhealthy, which is likely to tax the system heavily just as it gets started.

Will Chip Run?

In past Vital Signs Blog posts, I've alerted readers to two remarkable books written by former Douglas County Commissioner and Nebraska State Senator, Chip Maxwell. Both books are well-argued, succinct, and affordable -- so they really should be in your library.  Those books are Plain Talk on Stem Cell Research and Fix It Now: Rediscover the Constitution & Get America Out of Its Fiscal Death Spiral.

You can purchase both books by using the links to Amazon above. And, yes, Kindle versions are available too.

I've also mentioned here on the blog about Chip Maxwell's consideration of a run for Congress. And that's actually the prime subject of today's post; namely, to let Chip himself explain his reasoning to you via a news statement sent out earlier this morning.

However, let me preface Chip's letter with an admission of my own. Chip Maxwell is a friend and a pro-life colleague. And as a member of the Advisory Board of the Nebraska Coalition for Ethical Research, I have seen Chip's work (he has served as NCER's director and chief public spokesman) up close and personal. Both Claire and I have been quite impressed with him over the years. He is a witty, clear-thinking, well-spoken communicator who is able to not only understand complex and controversial issues but then to expertly translate them to others. That's why he's so good as a talk radio host. He is also a faithful, compassionate, generous family man.

All these qualities have made Chip Maxwell a very effective public servant in the past and we have hopes they will be appreciated by Nebraska's 2nd District Republicans in his campaign (if he runs) for Congress.

Okay, here's the statement from Chip Maxwell.

Earlier this year I talked about exploring a run for Congress. Two things happened in the spring and summer. One, I began a new job at TS Bank. Two, my dad was diagnosed with terminal cancer in early May and died June 30. The initial effect of the combined occurrences was to push politics off my radar screen. In the case of Dad’s death, though, the secondary effect was a jolt of urgency. If you see gray hair in the mirror and there’s something you think needs doing, you’d better go for it. I am hitting the reset button and resuming exploration of a run for Congress. I will decide by the end of the year whether to run.

In case you are wondering about the timing of this announcement, the recent flare-up over Congressman Terry’s shutdown paycheck is not a factor. I’ve been looking at this for a while. I met with Lee in the fall of 2011 to say I was looking at running. In the summer of 2012 I provided him an early draft of my book so he didn’t hear about it through the grapevine.

I want to make clear that there is nothing personal in this. When Lee learned that my father had died, he immediately called, and he and his wife and father came to the wake and were their usual warm and gracious selves, consoling me and my family with sincerity and good humor. I always will be grateful for that.

My motivation is a long-simmering concern over the long-term slide to the left in our national fiscal policy. I’m more worked up about what the president said yesterday than I am about anything Lee Terry has said or done.

The president said raising the debt ceiling does not increase the debt. He is lying, or he is so steeped in leftist ideology that he fails to grasp, or refuses to acknowledge, basic principles of government finance. He says we aren’t going to spend any more money than what was already approved. Yes, but we don’t have enough money in the Treasury to pay for that level of spending. So he wants to raise the debt ceiling and borrow more money to cover the difference – which increases the debt!

This president is setting up his children and mine for a fiscal mauling. I’m going to see if I can do something about it.

Adult Stem Cells: The Future of Medicine

We've been demonstrating for a long time that the hope among scientists and grant writers that the use of embryonic stem cells would somehow, some way, someday prove medically useful was an immoral, expensive, and ultimately unworkable dead end.

Indeed, over and over again, it has been adult stem cell experiments and practical treatments that have paved the way for the future. Restored health, energized hope, lives saved -- that's the record of adult stem cells. Whereas ESCR has given us zero.

Want a case in point?

Oppose Persecution -- At All Levels

ESCR Has Left the Building

"Not With a Bang, But a Whimper: After more than a decade of research on embryonic stem cells, scientists are quietly moving on to greener pastures."

Michael Cook, editor of MercatorNet, has a superb review of the embryonic stem cell controversy.

Let’s wind the clock back to 2003. In January wheelchair-bound quadriplegic actor Christopher Reeve visited Australia to promote the legalisation of “therapeutic cloning”. This was absolutely necessary, he said, or patients would die needlessly. Scepticism about the potential of embryonic stem cells was utterly unwarranted. "That's a myth,” he told his Australian audience. “That's not true. Don't let anyone tell you it is a pipedream."

In July that year the New England Journal of Medicine, the world’s leading medical journal, published a review article about the “promise of universal healing” in embryonic stem cells. “The Promethean prospect of eternal regeneration awaits us, while time's vulture looks on,” the hyperventilating author wrote.

In short, people were excited. So excited, in fact, that in 2005 Australia passed legislation enabling “therapeutic cloning” for research purposes.

It’s hard to recapture the intensity of that debate, in Australia and elsewhere. The cause was urgent. “We have lost so much time already, and I just really can't bear to lose any more,” said former First Lady Nancy Reagan. Scientists became political activists.  They lobbied politicians and insisted that therapeutic cloning would lead to cures for Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s and diabetes. "I have never seen in my career a biological tool as powerful as the stem cells. It addresses every single human disease," said Hans Keirstead, of the University of California, Irvine.

Dissenters contended that adult stem cells already offered ethical avenues to cures and that embryonic stem cells would never work. Embryos were human beings and that it was moral madness to treat human life as a research tool…

The stakes were immense and the dissenters lost. Ethics had to take a back seat to science…

But the cures never came...

Press releases continued to gush from stem cell institutes, but they were always about promising developments rather than proven cures. In 2011, after many false starts and a year after launching a human trial for spinal cord injuries to cure people like Christopher Reeve, the California-based biotechnology firm Geron pulled the plug on all of its embryonic stem cell research to focus on cancer drugs. It had to: it was going broke.

The reason why stem cell research with embryos has faded from the headlines is that it has been superseded by “induced pluripotent stem cells”. In 2007 Japanese researcher Shinya Yamanaka showed that it was possible to create stem cell lines from skin cells without destroying embryos. Almost immediately leading stem cell scientists abandoned embryonic stem cell research. Yamanaka – a man who had spurned embryonic stem cell research as unethical -- won the Nobel Prize in Medicine last year...

To get government funding so that they could play God with human embryos, scientists and bioethicists barnstormed, fibbed, exaggerated, hyped, and caricatured. It was a brutal battle in which truth came second. "People need a fairy tale," said Ronald D.G. McKay, another leading stem cell scientist.

Foes of embryo research were called troglodytes and religious fundamentalists. Their scientific credentials were questioned. They were accused of being callous and indifferent to the suffering of patients with chronic illness.

And yet they were right.

Not one person has been cured with embryonic stem cells. Not one. There is still a long way to go before Yamanaka’s cells can be used to treat patients. But the solution, when comes, will not require the destruction of embryos.

Isn’t anyone prepared to say, “Sorry”?

New Brain Cells? Yet Another Adult Stem Cell Breakthrough.

When will the politicians, academicians and foundations get hip to the
fact that it's adult stem cells and not embryonic stem cells that provide the best hope for radical improvements in health care?

While ESCR experiments continue to produce a lot of politically-correct jargon but no substantial medical progress at all, adult stem cells are not only providing remarkable advances in theory, they are being used in hundreds of applications that are saving lives right now.

Here's news on the latest development; namely, the discovery of an antibody "that can turn stem cells from a patient's bone marrow directly into brain cells, a potential breakthrough in the treatment of neurological diseases and injuries."

Even at UNMC, They're "Seeing" the Light on Adult Stem Cells

From yesterday's Lincoln Journal/Star, Mark Andersen reports:

Researchers at the University of Nebraska Medical Center on Tuesday announced a significant step in adult stem cell research that could take science closer to cures for glaucoma and age-related macular degeneration.

A team led by Iqbal Ahmad, professor of ophthalmology and visual sciences, used adult stem cells from the cornea, the clear window at the front of the eye, and reprogrammed them to act like cells in a developing baby’s retina.

The retina, located at the back of the eye, transforms light into neural signals that can be interpreted by the brain, an essential part of vision.

Ahmad said the team’s work built off that of Drs. John B. Gurdon and Shinya Yamanaka, who won this year’s Nobel Prize in science after they genetically altered adult stem cells to mimic embryonic stem cells.

Before the pair's discovery, scientists believed embryonic cells, which have far greater potential to develop into different types of cells, could come only from embryos…

[My note -- Let's be a bit more honest here. Actually, it has only been some scientists who have believed there was "far greater potential" with embryonic stem cells. And that's because all of the research thus far has pointed to adult stem cells being the most successful course. Indeed, millions of people have already been helped by treatments using adult stem cells. Embryonic stem cell research, on the other hand, has been but a dead end.]

The article continues…

In a coming experiments, he said, researchers will try to discover whether the new cells truly integrate in ways that could restore sight.

The group’s approach might be adapted to resolve other problems that cause blindness, he said, such as age-related macular degeneration.

In that case, the adult stem cells could be reprogrammed by a different chemical environment to resemble the eye’s photoreceptors, cells that react to light. Those cells are very similar in makeup to retinal ganglion cells.

Such modified cells also can be studied to see what genes are responsible for sight degeneration and what genes fight vision loss. This could lead to drugs that block the degenerative genes or bolster genes that fight vision loss, Ahmad said.

“We’ve shown that changing the environment around these adult stem cells can change the cells themselves,” Ahmad said. “We now seek more efficient ways to create these transformative environments to cultivate these powerful cells that may offer hope to so many.”

Science is incremental, Ahmad said, and many more steps remain before those developments can be used to create medical treatments.

The group’s work has shown enough promise to secure a $1.48 million, four-year grant from the National Institutes of Health.

The Latest Research? Stem Cells (Morally Obtained) Are the Way to Go.

A paper published in Nature today could dispel a cloud over the hopes of turning a patient’s own cells into perfectly matched replacement tissues.

Scientists first reported in 2007 that a person’s cells could be reprogrammed to an embryo-like state, and so could form any type of cell in the body. Medical researchers immediately imagined using these ‘induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells’ to create an endless supply of genetically matched replacement tissues to treat a range of diseases: fresh pancreatic tissue for diabetics, for example, or new nerve cells for people with Parkinson’s.

The strategy also seemed to offer a way around the ethical complexities of using stem cells derived from human embryos. But then came the worries about possible side effects…

The latest Nature study rejects that conclusion. Masumi Abe, a geneticist at the National Institute of Radiological Sciences in Chiba, Japan, and his team took iPS cells derived from mice and injected them back into the animals. For comparison, they injected other mice with embryonic stem (ES) cells. Yet unlike the 2011 study, which saw iPS cells perform worse than ES cells, the team found no differences between the immune responses of each group. The researchers also transplanted skin and bone-marrow cells derived from iPS or ES cells into mice and achieved similar success rates between the groups. The immune response of both sets of tissues is “indistinguishable”, says Abe.

Konrad Hochedlinger, a stem-cell scientist at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, says that the result will probably “calm people down” about iPS cells. “It is definitely reassuring,” he says.

The findings follow another positive study on iPS cells, published late last year, which found that the reprogramming process causes fewer mutations than previously thought...

As ethicist Wesley J.Smith comments, "Good ethics and good science have the cultural healing power to produce a common way forward.  Onward."

December's Doings...And More!

"But before we move into 2013, we have to take care of December duties.  And for a couple as deep into Christmas as Claire and me, that’s no small thing!"

The latest LifeSharer letter is up over at the Vital Signs Ministries web site.

The letter previews a few of the things we're planning for the coming year as well as Claire's and my hectic (but exciting) December's doings.

Check it out.

In Vitro Ferilization's Terrible Secret

The research scientists (like those at the Yale School of Medicine who presented an intensive study a few years ago) tell us that around 80-85% of the embryos transferred during in vitro fertilization never make it to birth.

And since nearly two million kids have been born through IVF methods (as has been boasted by specialists in the field), that means that at least 10,000,000 embryos involved in IVF transfer didn't make it.

Wow.

That's why, every once in awhile, I post this brief column I originally wrote for a Vital Signs" radio program. I'm afraid it is as relevant as ever.

What Happens to the "Extra" Embryos?

Amid all the talk about the ever-increasing availability of in vitro fertilization techniques, one issue is almost never mentioned; namely, what happens to all those extra embryos?

Well, to be frank, almost none of them make it.

Despite whatever warm feeling one might have towards infertile couples who are being helped to conceive a child through in vitro fertilization, it is important to understand this fact -- in vitro fertilization generally creates multiple embryos to ensure a greater probability of success. And, yes, most of the little humans thus created die. Either those embryos die as a result of the limitation of the female body to accommodate them properly or, in many instances, they are never implanted in the first place.

In the case of the embryos left over in the storage facilities of fertility clinics, different fates await them. They can, for instance, be frozen for some unspecified purpose in the distant future (the storage frequently being lethal itself) or they can be sold or donated to scientific research, a monstrous end from which none survive. Many IVF clinics merely incinerate the tiny guys and gals when they die, treating them no better than medical waste. Others, trying to be less crass, give the embryos some kind of funeral.

But no matter where the tiny bodies end up, they’re simply dead bodies, not living, growing human beings. And nothing, not even the heartbreak of being unable to naturally conceive children, can justify such brutal pragmatics.