Science Changes. The wheels of politics grind slowly. Science is changing now faster than ever before. These facts suggest that politics and political issues based on science are always behind the curve. By the time a science based issue becomes a major political issue, the science behind the issue has changed radically enough to make the political debate and the political issue fairly irrelevant, to avoid saying idiotic.

This is aggravated by a kind of inertia inherent in politics and science. Political parties once committed to one side or another of an issue find it very difficult to change their position even if the science no longer supports it. So political parties will not change a political position which is based on out of date science.

Scientists who have based research proposals and and careers on a specific idea will not abandon it even when new science renders it invalid.

Scientists who perceive the opposition to an idea as originating in religious authorities will support out of date science even knowing it is not valid any longer to prevent religion from dictating scientific policy.

So, out of date science can always find 'scientific' authorities to support it when political parties look for them.

Of Course, there is also the Lysenko Effect. Scientists who do 'science' to please the party bosses.

So, whenever listening to 'science' based political issues you will always hear a large percentage of basically antiquated outdated nonsense being passed off as science.

Embryonic Stem Cell Therapy is typical.

The scientific basis for believing that Embryonic Stem Cells represent a promise for therapy which other stem cells do not is based on a dictum by

Santiago Ramon y Cajal
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santiag...C3%B3n_y_Cajal

A brilliant, Nobel Prize winning scientist, he did great work in neuroscience using the very best medical technology available around 1890. 1890 was a long time ago, and microscopes have gotten a lot better since then. His contribution to the Stem Cell debate was Cajal's "No New Neurons" principle.

"1960s - Joseph Altman and Gopal Das present scientific evidence of adult neurogenesis, ongoing stem cell activity in the brain; their reports contradict Cajal's "no new neurons" dogma and are largely ignored."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stem_cell

As you can see, adult stem cells were discovered and ignored in the 1960s.

Embryonic stem cells are not discovered until 1981.

"1981 - Mouse embryonic stem cells are derived from the inner cell mass by scientists Martin Evans, Matthew Kaufman, and Gail R. Martin. Gail Martin is attributed for coining the term "Embryonic Stem Cell"."

Since they are embryonic and not adult, they do not violate Cajal's dogma, and they are assumed to have potential for therapy which no other cells have.

This had already been proven wrong in the 1960s, but that scientific discovery was ignored for 20 years because of Cajal's doctrine. So this antiquated, more than a century old doctrine delayed research into stem cell therapy for 20 years.

Then it caused the focus for stem cell therapy research to be on embryonic rather than adult stem cells.

Today, when it is well known that Cajal's doctrine is false, when literally hundreds of scientific discoveries have proven it wrong, it remains the 'science' supporting the idea that embryonic stem cells represent a promise for cures which adult stem cells do not.

One political party is totally committed to basing policy on science that is literally more than a century old and which was proved, scientifically proven to be false almost half a century ago. That political party still misleads victims of disease like Alzheimers and others to support their policy.

This despite the fact that modern science shows quite clearly that adult stem cell therapy will deliver the same cures faster and in a form inherently safer for the patient.

The other political party bases its opposition to embryonic stem cell therapy not on the science involved but on religious opinions and the 'sanctity' of human life. This pushes the buttons of the scientific establishment who rush in to defend 'embryonic stem cell therapy' simply to defend science from religious tyranny.

One party wants to destroy science and make it a puppet mouthing the party 'religious' line.

The other party bases its 'science' on principles that are more than a century old and which have been proven completely false over the last fifty years.

Pretty laughable when you get to it, or pretty sad. It is especially sad for the victims of diseases like Alzheimer's and others which will not be cured by research into embryonic stem cell therapy but will be cured by adult stem cell therapy. They have been bamboozled by this comic farce into supporting policies which will actually delay the discovery of treatments for their conditions for another two or three decades.

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"Yankee-Do: The Way of the American" A book I wrote never published about 8 years ago.

I didn't read more than the first few words of the original post.

Here is my take on "Science and Politics":

There should be a separation between science and politics because scientists often don't understand the social ramifications of their findings and theories, and politicians often plain don't understand the science.

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My enduring personal, original quote: Many mistake what should rightly be called "passivism" for pacifism. Pacifism and passivism are COMPLETELY different.
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"I know the human being and fish can coexist peacefully." --President George W. Bush.
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Everything about the War on Terror(ism) is aggravating.

It is unfortunate but true that at this point in the discussion of embryonic stem cell therapy it is necessary to discuss the psychology of human sacrifice.

Wikipedia naturally has a pretty good article on it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_sacrifice

One thing wiki does not inquire into is the psychological mechanism underlying what is almost a universal practice in early human societies.

Amusingly, ironically, or tragically, the fundamental psychological principle underlying human sacrifice is 'the golden rule'.

"Do unto others as you would have them do unto you."

The Golden Rule, is, not surprisingly, just as universal in human society as human sacrifice.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethic_o...he_Golden_Rule

If you want the Gods or God to give you a life, then you give them a life. Now this principle has been shown by modern scientific studies to actually be hardwired into social primates.

This was discussed on a program on Book TV on C Span. I have not been able to find a quick reference online. A google will find lots of discussion, and admission that the phenomena is pretty universal, but discussion of whether it is biological, cultural or both in origin.

So, the universality of reciprocity and human sacrifice is well established.

The origin of reciprocity is unclear to many whether it is purely cultural or has a biological basis.

The origin of Human Sacrifice is not discussed in any real sense with regards to why humans should engage in such absurd behavior.

I have no doubt that Human Sacrifice, in fact all religious sacrifice, is a religious ritual based on the psychology of reciprocity.

If you want the Gods or God to give you something, you have to give them something in return. If you want something big like a miracle cure you have to give them something big, like a human life.

I believe, and I have seen mention of Book TV and elsewhere of scientific evidence that this reflex is hardwired into the human brain, in fact, into the brains of all social primates and most social animals.

So this is the origin of human sacrifice.

Now Embryonic Stem Cell therapy duplicates this. You take the life of a new human being and you get a miracle cure.

It makes emotional sense in the terms of fundamental evolutionary mechanisms of human behavior. It is why human sacrifice is an almost universal phenomenon in early human societies.

Sadly, many desperate people still perform human sacrifices today. It is known to occur in the African Diaspora and is something of an industry in some East African countries today. Tourists dying of incurable diseases go there to have young black men or boys sacrificed to cure them.

Embryonic Stem Cell therapy has this psychological oomph, something that adult stem cell therapy lacks. I strongly suspect that this is part of why Embryonic Stem Cell therapy has captured the popular imagination in ways that adult stem cell therapy has not.

This will gain me no fans, and certainly not work to convince anyone. It is too offensive a thesis to all involved. Nonetheless, I remain convinced that it is true, and that it should be discussed among reasonable men seeking to understand these matters.

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"Yankee-Do: The Way of the American" A book I wrote never published about 8 years ago.

Come out with it. Any minute now someone is going to bring up abortion.

Look, these things are not human, they're potentially human. Therefore it is not human sacrifice. Human sacrifice is the sacrificing of humans, not potential humans. Sacrifice implies religion so human sacrifice is a religious procedure. Since religion allowed human sacrifice then religion must be evil because human sacrifice is evil. Right?

Lysenko. In Stalin's Soviet Union - nowhere else - Lysenko championed Lamarckism on the basis that Lamarckism operated somehow under the principle of dialectical materialism, a Marxist concept. Stalin was an ideologue when it came to dialectical materialism, when Lysenko told him that his form of genetics (and he declared himself an "anti-Mendelian") fell square with dialectical materialism Stalin was quite pleased. Any scientist who disagreed on a scientific basis and who was a Soviet scientist was either banished or shot. Outside the USSR real scientists were pissing themselves laughing at Lysenko.

Spanky is spot on.

Religion should be kept out of science as well and kept out of public policy. Religion is a personal matter, science affects all of us, even those of us who don't much like the idea of science. Science should be part of public policy, it should not feature in partisan politics. And it's up to us to ensure our politicians understand that.

"[quote=Diuretic;802707]Come out with it. Any minute now someone is going to bring up abortion."

This has got to be considered a sort of conditioned response. Anyone who even proposes that adult stem cell therapy will work as well or beter than embryonic stem cell therapy is a religious nutcase opposed to abortion and championing the human rights of blastocytes.

It is an interesting way of silencing debate on the issues of where the real science lies, but does not address any actual issues, it is just a way of shouting down people who don't agree with the author.

The facts regarding the history of embryonic stem cell therapy are as I related them. The science that we now have clearly shows that embryonic stem cell therapy is something of a dead end which will take decades longer to develop than adult stem cell therapy.

This debate should exist independent of any debate on abortion. The fact that the abortion debate has hijacked this issue is one of the most significant problems in debating it.


"Look, these things are not human, they're potentially human. Therefore it is not human sacrifice. Human sacrifice is the sacrificing of humans, not potential humans."

This is a simplistic and rather silly summation of a complex issue. Human sacrifice is a psychological and cultural phenomenon. Therefore the biological humanity of the sacrifice is secondary to the psychological or perceived humanity of the sacrifice. If humans are driven by instinct to perceive x as human, the biological truth of whether x is human or not is irrelavant to the question of whether or not the act is human sacrifice in psychological terms.

"Sacrifice implies religion so human sacrifice is a religious procedure. Since religion allowed human sacrifice then religion must be evil because human sacrifice is evil. Right?"

This shows a profound ignorance of the history of religion matched only by Southern Baptists and other Bible Thumpers. In my experience, this kind of ignorance is typified by men like Pat Robertson and other people who make their money soliciting donations to their church on TV.

Sacrifice does not imply religion, it implies reciprocity. It is an act of reciprocity, you give and expect in return, and is a biological imperative for social animals. Whether you are working in the expectation of being paid, working to pay to put your children through college, or otherwise making sacrifices for others, the term sacrifice applies.

Religious sacrifice is only one small aspect of a larger psychological and social phenomenon, so your statement is again simplistic and rather silly.

Second. The Judeo-Christian-Islamic family of religion has a relatively clean record with regards to human sacrifice. It outlawed it thousands of years before it was condemned in Greek and Roman society. So, in the particular issue of human sacrifice, Judeo-Christian-Islamic religion is essentially innocent and cannot justly be condemned, so no, religion is not evil when the discussion of human sacrifice is the criterion being considered.

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"Yankee-Do: The Way of the American" A book I wrote never published about 8 years ago.

It is worthwhile to bring some more specifics into this discussion by comparing therapeutic cloning and adult stem cell therapy.

Therapeutic cloning is inserting the dna of an adult who needs therapy into an embryonic stem cell to produce cells which are the same DNA as the patient thus, hopefully, avoiding immune system problems.

This should work because a total change of the environment of the DNA, taking it out of an adult cell and putting it into an embryonic cell should cause it to begin to act like an embryonic cell.

This is basically changing the environment of DNA to change the way in which it acts.

Adult Stem cell therapy is basically exactly the same in theory. You change the chemical cues in a cell, and it changes the DNA so it acts like a stem cell and becomes the cell types you need.

You could refer to therapeutic cloning as the shotgun approach, change the entire environment all at once by putting the DNA into an embryonic stem cell, and the Adult Stem Cell therapy approach as the surgical approach, only change those things in the environment necessary to produce the kind of cells you want.

Now, if therapeutic cloning works in theory, then adult stem cell therapy also works in theory, because the basic theory is exactly the same.

Change the environment of the DNA and you will change the way that the DNA acts.

The difference is technical rather than theoretical. Do you change the entire environment by changing the entire cell, or do you only change the things in the cellular environment you need to change to get the changes you want?

The conclusion is that if therapeutic cloning is theoretically possible, adult stem cell therapy is theoretically equally possible and the question becomes which one is technically easier to accomplish.

Is it easier to take the DNA out of one cell and insert it into another or is it easier to just change one or two factors in an existing cell to get the changes you want.

This depends on the state of knowledge.

1) It takes a lot of detailed knowledge of the cellular environment to just change one or two factors to get the changes you want. Huge learning curve involved to change adult cells into stem cells producing the cells we want. Hard, hard, hard.

2) We know embryonic stem cells do what we want, we can just grab the DNA and pop it into a cell like they did with Dolly the sheep. Much easier at the 'then' current state of knowledge.

This was pretty much the state of knowledge a decade or so ago. At that time, therapeutic cloning looked very promising.

There were hidden road blocks. It turns out that cloning primates is much, much more difficult than cloning sheep. There is apparently a kind of intra-cell velcro which binds the dna in place and pulling it out and reinserting it destroys its structural integrity making cloning of primates impossible at this time. To the best of my knowledge recent claims to have done it successfully have been discredited as hoaxes. Even if there are a few isolated successes, reliable success is decades and decades away.

So therapeutic cloning sounded simpler and easier than adult stem cell therapy and looked really, really good.

Today things have changed. One study has discovered pluripotent adult stem cells, a commentator said that he did not think the study methods had discovered pluripotent adult stem cells, but that they had created them.

Really, the ability to create pluripotent cells is even better than the ability to find them, for purposes of therapy.

Huge numbers of studies have found adult stem cells with various stages of potency to change into different cells. This makes adult stem cell therapy a promise which will take much less time to realize than embryonic stem cell therapy.

Adult stem cell therapy avoids immune system response problems. Modern medicine have discovered a growing and quite large number of medical problems which are related to genetic chimeras. Large numbers of people have genes growing inside them from other people. This is common among fraternal twins and occassionally happens with cells from the mother passing the placenta and growing as part of the child. Such people incorporate these genes at the earliest part of their formation, embryonically, and they still create medical problems due to immune response problems as adults. So immune system response is definitely a problem with embryonic stem cell therapy.

Therapeutic cloning is supposed to solve this. The problem is that it introduces the chance of damage to the dna during the cloning process, it also introduces alien mitochondrial dna in the cell walls, and that is known to be more active than it was thought to be and is known in some cases to migrate into the nucleus.

So therapeutic cloning introduces risks to the patient which do not exist with adult stem cell therapy.

Adult stem cell therapy is inherently safer for the patient than embryonic stem cell therapy can ever possibly be. It is theoretically impossible to ever make embryonic stem cell therapy as safe as adult stem cell therapy.

With modern research, it also appears that it will be easier and faster to develop adult stem cell therapy than embryonic stem cell therapy.

Hopefully, big business, looking at the technical realities involved will steer research in this field in the direction most likely to produce real cures and not be influenced by the political hype involved.

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"Yankee-Do: The Way of the American" A book I wrote never published about 8 years ago.

Science removed from politics? That's what the Bush administration did, and every administration pre-U.S.A..

There should be no separation between science and state. Theories are not infinitely changing. Science can reach a finalized condition. The problem you declare does not come close to requiring separation. It's obvious you have an anti-science agenda (and therefore, most likely pro-religion).

It's called political science for good reason. If you actually understood science or politics, you would never suggest just having 'politics', driven not by established laws, facts, truths and calculated theories, but rather by the whim of tyrants and usurpers.

i have often thought that some decisions should be made by the people who know about the subject, rather then the people who just have a believe based on a poor understanding.

for example, take abortion for example. I think the religious people (pastor, not the church goers), scientists and ethics should make this decision rather then the general population. As the General Population has a very poor understanding of these things.

The candidates on Science:

Obama:
"My administration will increase funding for basic research in physical and life sciences, mathematics, and engineering at a rate that would double basic research budgets over the next decade. We will increase research grants for early-career researchers to keep young scientists entering these fields."

Mccain:
"To maintain American leadership, I believe we must nurture the conditions under which entrepreneurs can continue to prosper by bringing new innovators to market and the American people can reap the rewards."

His statement on the topic of "Innovation in Science and Technology" is 96% focused on technology. His stance on federal funding for scientific research is elusive. The full statements from both candidates on this and similar topics can be found at the link below.

As a scientists, I have observed that some of the most accomplished and brilliant scientists of our generation are finding themselves without federal funding for the first time in their long careers, thanks to the "missile first....science last" policies of the Bush administration.




http://www.sciencedebate2008.com/www/index.php?id=42