I'll start with the coma. This article, from CBS News August 3, 2005, tells of a woman who had been in a coma for twenty years and woke up in February. Doctors had to do surgery to repair Sarah Scantlin's muscles that had atrophied, as well as giving her speech therapy to unlock her long-unused tongue.
Although her speech is still limited, Sarah has shown that she was aware of what was going on around her since the accident that hospitalized her in 1984.
However, it seems that throughout her 20-year coma, she could see, hear, and understand what was going on around her. Shortly after she awoke, her father asked what she knew about events that had occurred years earlier.
"Sarah, what's 9/11?" her father asks. She responds, "Bad…fire…airplanes…building…hurt people."
Sarah's comatose condition should not be confused with Terri Schiavo's condition of having been brain damaged. Though it may not look like it to the people around a comatose person, there is something going on in there.
Embryonic Stem Cells and Frist:
This column, by Michael Fumento in Townhall.com, is from August 4, 2005. In it, he takes Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist to task for coming out in support of embryonic stem cell research. Here are some key points that Fumento makes:
Frist’s position is compelling, we’re told, not just because he’s the highest-ranking Senate Republican but also a physician. Actually, that makes him as much a specialist on stem cells as a plumber is on aquatic chemistry. A bit of reading will give you more knowledge about these cells than the average doctor possesses. You might learn that ASCs [adult stem cells] are CURRENTLY used in over 250 human clinical trials and are treating over 80 different diseases.
ESC researchers sniff that this is only because their field is newer, but research on both types of cell dates back to the 1950s. ESCs aren’t playing catch-up; they’re falling behind.
Another myth that Frist propagated in his “breakaway” speech is that “embryonic stem cells uniquely hold specific promise for some therapies and potential cures that adult stem cells cannot provide.” In fact, ALL that ESCs have is promise. That’s why advocates feel obliged to claim they’ll eventually cure every disease from Alzheimer’s to acne. But again, had Frist done his homework he’d know that three years ago scientists began changing ASCs into ALL three types of cells the body produces.
Since then, countless labs have used various forms of ASCs to make all those cell types, but ESC advocates insist you not know this. They also go bonkers if you mention at least four different methods of creating ESCs without destroying embryos are being developed, as the June issue of Wired documents.
Ironically, the clamor for massively-increased public funding for ESCs is precisely because their practical applications, if any, lie many years in the future while those of ASCs are here and now.
ESC research supporters like to point to a study in rats that showed some positive results. But although the CBS News article covering that story in October, 2002, had a positive headline ("Stem Cells Ease Parkinson's In Rats"), the results weren't all rosy. In a test of 25 rats, 14 improved, however you had to go way down toward the end of the article to find the "but."
They killed them a few months later and looked at their brains. The 14 rats who got better all had new brain cells, and testing showed the cells had developed into neurons and other brain cells from the mouse stem cell transplants.
Some of these cells produced dopamine, thus treating the Parkinson's symptoms in the rats, the researchers said.
Five of the rats died and they turned out to have teratomas -- a kind of tumor -- at the injection site.
Isacson said this is one risky side effect of using stem cells, which can differentiate, or develop into mature cells, in an uncontrolled way. He is working to find ways to reduce this risk.
Twenty percent of the rats died from tumors, while nearly sixty percent improved. Those aren't usually the odds people like to see. This kind of "risky side effect" of uncontrolled stem cells does not appear to be a factor when treating people with adult stem cells.
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