My favorite Magellan quote
A bank that will create and supply new lines of embryonic stem cells for research around the world has been opened in Seoul, South Korea.
The project is being led by cloning expert Dr Woo Suk Hwang, who has pioneered the development of stem cells tailored to individual patients.
It will serve as the main centre for an international consortium, including the US and the UK.
You had to expect a service like this would have to come from somewhere outside of nations who kowtow to religious fundamentalism. The government of South Korea is providing some of the funds for this project — while Western and Middle Eastern governments spend another couple of decades in dialogue with the Dark Ages fraternity.
The new bank is expected to help scientists from countries like the US get round government restrictions on stem cell research.
The Bush administration bans federal funding for research on all but a handful of old embryonic stem-cell lines.
The first branches of the stem cell bank will open in the UK and the US.
It is hoped to create about 100 cells lines per year with genetic defects that cause such diseases as diabetes, Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s.
Dr Hwang told Associated Press: “When the use of these stem cells is limited to a particular country, it takes much too long to create technologies usable for the whole of humanity.
“By creating a global network, we plan to share stem cells created in each country and share information on those stem cells.”
I am very proud that not all of humanity is incapable of dealing with reality.
I don’t know if this is just wide-eyed optimism on my part, but that seems bloody brilliant. I would like to think that this type of research could be led by someone under the principle that it should be shared with everyone.
(And lord knows it wouldn’t be the US leading that kind of charge.)
Your distaste for religion is glowing in the last 3 posts. It’s obvious and disrespectfull. As a Christian, I’d expect to get flogged for acting the same way about people who belive differently than I do. Here, I’m not talking about the content of this post but your only loosly related Magellen quote.
As another example, In your post about the Christian radio station you never backed up your reasons as to why it is a bad thing. You mention how horrible you find it that the high school radio station got trumped by the Christian radion station. It says that they did a study to see how many listeners of each there would be. You didn’t challege that logic. It appears to me that the logical conclusion is that there were more people willing to listen to the Christian station than the high school station. My piont here is that by only stating that it was a “Christian” station you are assuming that your readers also would be offended as you were just because it was religious. Regardless of my opinion on the FCC, it makes sense that the limited resource of bandwidth has to be devided up in a reasonable fassion and the number of listeners seems like a good metric.
These “spit in your face” attacks on religion are disappointing. I wish you would be more mindfull that there are other people with different viewpoints.
I realize this needs occasional pointing out; but — Michael, there are several folks posting here. I posted the article about stem cells. John Dvorak posted the article about the student radio station. If you look immediately beneath the caption for any article, you’ll see who posted it.
By the way, Keith Olberman’s Countdown on MSNBC awarded that “Christian” Broadcasting Group 2nd place as today’s “Worst Person[s] in the World”.
I’m not sure why people are so enthusiastic about cloning. That’s what Ron Reagan was proposing at the Democrat Convention, and that’s what’s happening here. To get the stem cells, embryos are cut up after a few days, but what if they wait for a few weeks, a few months, or a few years? Do you still think corporations should be free to produce clones and harvest them at age 2? Lots of potentially valuable research was sealed or destroyed after World War II because the methods used in the research was considered reprehensible, but it appears if people had just used the magic words ‘stem cells’ all this research would have been OK.