I do hear about stem cell advances both with adult and fetal stem cells. The thing is, fetal stem cells have the potential to work better for several reasons. The most compleing is this: adult stem cells have old mitochondria, while fetal stem cells have brand new mitochondria. The age of the mitochondria of a cell has been shown conclusively to affect the health of a cell (cells with old mitochondria are succeptable to problems that cells with young mitochondria aren't).
Obviously this has consequences on the success of a therapy that utilizes stem cells. If you're using the therapy to treat an 80 year old, it probably doesn't matter since the person's mitochondria are old anyway. However, if you plan to use the therapy on a young person, but have derived the stem cells from older tissue, you can run into the problem of the new tissue that grew from the stem cells 'aging' before the person.

There are tons of aspects of adults stem cells that are very interesting, and may yield several therapies and treatments for disease. But that doesn't mean that fetal stem cells won't be valuable for a separate set of diseases or therapies. Adult and fetal stem cells are not identicle to each other, and therefore they are each interesting and valuable. Limiting funding for research on fetal stem cells simply limits the scope of what American researches can look at.


And that's really beside the point of the article. The real issue is that the executive branch of our government (trained in politics) exercises censorship on the surgeon general (trained in medicine). To me, that makes no sense whatsoever.

 

Does anything with this administration make any sense to anyone?



Oh yeah, 29% of the populus approves! w00t!

 

How does this differ from any other administration? The surgeon general is appointed by the executive branch.

 

I guess you didn't read the article...other admins have done similar things. But it's gotten worse during this admin, and the last two before the present surgeon general said they wouldn't work under the present conditions.

 

Ahhh I see. It's pointless at this point, Bush has done a fine job of destroying his adminstration without the help of the press. I guess a little bit more smear doesn't hurt. Actually if the press was smart they'd let Bush run the show without the smear. Pointing out his mistakes give him a chance to correct them or make an excuse.