There are so many angles to this story that involve the tension between the forces of conservative thinking, and innovators who are trying to make the world a better place. Ignore the idiotic airport security problem, and you're still left with an amazing, improbable story about the world-changing consequences of an emerging technology that religious luddites keep trying to destroy.
Only a few short years ago, our society was getting its collective panties in a knot over the ethics of stem cell research. The US president made a strong movement to kill that research in the womb (pardon the pun). At the time, nobody could convincingly enumerate the medical benefits of the work...because it was research. Now we're synthesizing body parts. Amazing. How many years of human life will be saved? There's no upper limit. "Pro-life", indeed.
Save this story, and use it the next time you're in an argument with someone who wants to stop pure intellectual exploration in the name of vague, supernatural objections.
(Edit: Yes, these particular organs are being synthesized from adult stem cells, not embryonic stem cells. But it's a distinction without a difference -- we cannot predict what advancements or understanding will come from any given line of research. The argument is greater than the adjective.)
These aren't embryonic stem cells. No one has a problem with adult stem cells (well, I suppose the folks who refuse all forms of medical treatment might).
Untrue. There are/were plenty of groups who object to all stem cell research. Embryonic cells are just the most controversial segment. (Consider this thought experiment: take a fully differentiated human cell, and transform it such that it is capable of generating a embryo. Do you think this won't generate objections on religious grounds?)
The heart of the debate is that our knowledge is pushing relentlessly against the darkness of superstition, and that makes some people uncomfortable -- just as every scientific advancement has made people uncomfortable. We're just in a sad period where these people have greater influence over our society's decisions.
'Richard Doerflinger of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, an expert on bioethics issues, told the Associated Press the research "raises more ethical questions than it answers."..."It is widely believed that one cell of a very early embryo may separate and become a new embryo, an identical twin," Doerflinger told the Associated Press.'
Here's another response to the same experiment, which better captures the root of the objections:
'"Regardless of the speculated benefits, no human being, particularly the most vulnerable, should be treated as raw material which we can manipulate and manufacture," Mr O'Gorman said.'
It has everything to do with them: there's no such thing as an "adult" stem cell. There are only differentiated and undifferentiated cells, and "embryonic" is a useful description only insofar as it describes the source of origin of an established cell line. The techniques that those quotes were concerning don't destroy embryos -- they turn differentiated cells into undifferentiated cells -- but that's enough to trigger the objections.
Said another way, there's no fundamental reason that "adult" stem can't be converted to an "embryonic" state. And the quotes above illustrate that once you do that, you run afoul of the opponents. The religious groups don't want to prohibit "embryonic" stem cell research; they want to prevent anyone from doing any sort of science that they perceive to be in violation of their notion of human-being-ness. Science doesn't support the distinctions that they're making, and therefore, the conflict is unresolvable.
I am 99% sure the distinction, as it matters to the Catholic Church or anyone else using the term, is that “embryonic” refers to having been harvested from an embryo.
You completely misread his question. He wasn't referring to embryonic stem cells at all. I think hardly anyone has a problem with using something like mesenchymal stem cells for cartilage regeneration (well, the FDA maybe, but that's a different story).
The security professions need to learn a lesson which doctors have understood for some time now: treating everyone for a rare threat does more harm than good.
Suppose there is a drug which prevents heart attacks, but due to side effects, rare reactions, or just plain error, causes damage to a small proportion of people. If you have a 50% chance of a heart attack, taking it would be a good bet. But giving the same drug to everyone would be a medical disaster.
Any treatment you give to a broad population had better be extraordinarily safe. The rarer the threat you are trying to address, the more easily you can do more harm than good.
Yes and no. Think of it this way: if you have a graph of security against cost, there is a line which represents possible tradeoffs of best security for a given cost. You are saying, we need to think about where we want to be on the line. I don't think we are even on the line.
"The security professions need to learn a lesson which doctors have understood for some time now: treating everyone for a rare threat does more harm than good."
Nanny states need to learn this principle too: "First do no harm".
We are starting to see glimpses of the hidden costs of airport security. Consider just that by discouraging flight, more people end up dead on the (vastly more) insecure roads.
i think there's a lesson here in risk management. the obviously brilliant doctor failed to put care and attention into the mundane delivery part of the process. there are no small details. Jet Star is a low price, zero premium service. for the cash/time invested, they should have being going business class with a premium airline, a signed piece of letterhead and if possible, hired an airline rep to walk them in one airport and out the other. someone's life hung on the balance of a student knowing a pilot...
To quote, "That done, Birchall's team booked the only direct flight from Bristol to Barcelona, operated by an airline called easyJet." Thus, your "business class with a premium airline" doesn't (appear) to have been feasible.
It is a sad day that speaks volumes about the world we live in now, that we encounter an article on such an important, ground-breaking topic, and it's titled 'Airport security refuses transport'.
It's possible to have multiple news articles concentrating on different aspects of the same event. I bet there are other articles out there that concentrate on the medical research. Not everything out there has to cover only the most important stuff.
Actually, they would have been fine six years ago - the liquid ban only came into force in 2006.
And the EU would very much like to lift the ban, because it's completely pointless - it's meant to be lifted on EU flights in April 2013. Except both the US and the aviation industry is heavily lobbying for the EU to scrap their plans, for 'security' reasons (if you were cynical you might suggest budget airlines and airports benefitted from a liquids ban, as people had to spend money in airports/on planes rather than bringing their own refreshments etc).
I hadn't seen it before. Reposts are not necessarily bad, if there are no comments, nobody saw the post, thus a repost is necessary. Perhaps the de-dup mechanism shouldn't incorporate comment-less posts as part of its data set.
