President-elect Obama’s four year term will surely start with billions earmarked for stem cell research– embryonic stem cell research. What America needs instead, is more money spent on stem cells which can already repair the human body in a hundred ways: Adult Stem Cells which I prefer to call Repair Stem Cells (RSC).
The reason why Americans want more money directed toward stem cells is clear: Millions of people are suffering from medical conditions for which there is no adequate current treatment, and the healthcare cost burden is staggering.
Unfortunately, science has already shown us that Embryonic Stem Cells (ESC) may not be the solution; after ten years of efforts to tame an Embryonic cell to do what it was not intended to do, the FDA is nowhere near allowing clinical trial testing on human beings.
Fortunately, all of our bodies already contain stem cells that repair our bodies, and perform this function every day of our lives, the Repair Stem Cell. These adult stem cells, and there are dozens of different types, constantly leap to our aid when we need help. Cut your finger, no problem; a repair skin cell will do its work and heal your skin. Break a bone? Ditto! Injure another part of your body, these stem cells are always ready to jump in and help. Sometimes though, our bodies need help to muster more of these stem cells to our aid than our bodies normally provide. That’s when we need the help of medical science to supplement our body’s own tool-kit.
To look to the future, Americans should be looking at Repair Stem Cells. For example, Osiris a USA company using world-leading science, has been working with the FDA to gain approval for some of its life-saving and life-improving Adult Stem Cell products. After years of Adult Stem Cell research, Osiris intends to finish clinical trials for two untreatable diseases in 2010 and get the products to market to save and improve lives NOW, while no embryonic clinical trials are even being considered for any disease —not one!
There are other U.S. companies too, such as Bioheart, another Adult Stem Cell company also in clinical trials, ready to bring help to victims of untreatable heart diseases, using science not available to Embryonic Stem Cells. Diabetics should know there are dozens of trials completed or ongoing using Repair Stem Cells to improve their health. I will make sure the White House, Congress and the public all know it.
America cannot afford another four years of falling further behind the only stem cell research which holds promise. We need change, and we need change now. President-elect Obama, I call on you to deliver the change we need to improve our suffering. Help us with directing more public funding to the gold standard of stem cells to repair the ailing bodies of all of us, children, working people, and the elderly — Repair Stem Cells. www.repairstemcells.org
Mr. Don Margolis
Chairman and Founder
The Repair Stem Cell Institute LLC
[email protected]
1-214-556-6377
Thanks, Fred, for asking the questions that led Anonymous to display the full depth of his fanaticism.
No point in further discussion with him. He’ll only respond with further raving and name calling.
Call me No Longer Puzzled in Peoria
You have a dim view of your fellow humans. A perusal of the history of the early U.S. does not reveal a people living “in tribal enclaves”, but instead finds the sort of property-respecting, cooperative atmosphere one would expect from an intelligent, mature people. Granted, given the very sorry state of modern education (imposed with stolen dollars) and the general sense of entitlement that Fred and Don and Gadfly are demonstrative of, one could fairly well predict a descent in barbarism, this very day, should the big government mammary somehow find itself pulled from the monster baby’s lips. But, the fact that the dismantling of the horrible edifice of mediocrity and perversion would cause certain calamity is, of course, no justification for creating the thing or sanctioning it. In fact, it is quite easy to see that the growth of entitlements (but one example of the claims on the individual’s life and property) will lead directly to upheavals in civilization no matter which way it devolves. The “system” as it is now, cannot be sustained. Its failure is insured as a necessary component of its success. We are watching its “success” kill us this very day, as the economy burns down a little more.
There is no such thing as “society”, and no one has an obligation of any kind to such an abstraction. It amounts to idolatry. Invoking “society” is the latest “refuge of scoundrels”.
There is no reason that any of it needs be anything but voluntary. Things like gasoline taxes to support highway maintenance are a step in the right direction (ie, if you drive you gotta buy gas to do it, but if you don’t drive, then roads aren’t coming out of your pocket, which, of course, with the rise of the electric car, will drive the statists mad with frenzy), but it would be even better to privatize roads and let owners figure out how best to develop/maintain them. Etc. Use your imagination.
Yes, that would be a good start. Or it would have been, before the federal aphids swarmed the tree of prosperity. Now, at the current pass, it’s not certain that killing the aphids will save the tree, but it is certain that letting them continue to suck the lifeblood from it will kill it. That’s what we face, and have always faced since the first step into the socialist garden of utopian fantasy.
Knowing what I know, I would not sign that document. Nor have I, of course, signed the thing. It grants too much leeway for the kind of abuse that has grown by topsy over the last century. As a contract, it depends over much on the good graces of those with access to the power it grants. Don and Fred and Gadfly, for instance, have no qualms about holding me up and fleecing me of whatever it is they can justify in their own minds. The framers of the Constitution clearly hoped that those exercising their own freedom would be intelligent enough and moral enough to understand that freedom carries with it a responsibility to respect other’s freedom, that because one can go around punching others in the nose, or taking their wallets, doesn’t necessarily make it right that one do so. Don and Fred and Gadfly have abused the responsibility that freedom confers, have hidden their moral turpitude in the legalisms of the Constitution, and are part of the rot currently infesting the foundations of our civilization.
Anonymous,
You repeatedly call taxation, enacted through a legitimate democratic process, “theft of what’s rightfully mine.” If everyone held that view and acted on it, the whole society would collapse and we would be reduced to living in tribal enclaves.
Fortunately, most of us view paying our taxes as a responsibility that comes with the remarkable rights our democracy offers us. In the long run, no one–you included–can have individual rights unless people fulfill their obligations to society as a whole.
Unless you are willing to live in a tribal society where everyone lives in armed camps to keep what’s “rightfully” theirs, our disagreement is not over the right of the government to impose and collect taxes, but over what tasks the government should do (and therefore tax to support).
So I have this final question for you:
Do you feel the same way about taxation for the common defense (as the apparently communist Constitution of the United States of America calls it)? What about taxation for public highways? What about taxation to “promote the general welfare and secure the blessings of liberty…to posterity,” which is where I think research support has been at its best?
In other words, Anonymous, do you believe that any taxation is valid? And if so, does everyone have the right to pick and choose what portion of their taxes to pay?
Or do you believe that we are all in this together, as the preamble to the Constitution states so clearly:
This will be my last response to you on this thread, unless you engage in personal attack.
Fred Bortz — Science and technology books for young readers (www.fredbortz.com) and Science book reviews (www.scienceshelf.com)
Everything is stood on its head in these times. I’m “fanatical” for resisting the theft of what’s rightfully mine, but the ones who will invariably bring their warrants of death to my door so as to take what they want from me are not fanatics, but the most peace-loving, well-intentioned, caring people you could ever hope to meet.
Rubbish.
Anon, we did discuss it before the discussion lurched into politics.
I said that I thought the present system was a sensible one. Is it “the best”? That’s an unanswerable question. But I do believe that a proper mix of government and private sector funding makes for an excellent research environment. And I do believe that we have safeguards to make sure that public investment is used well.
That’s not an ideological position but one based on a 25-year career in academic and industrial research after completing my Ph.D. in 1971, where I observed the way grants were issued, the way they were used, the way they were monitored, and, most important, the results they produced.
Add to that my reading of history of physics in particular, and I conclude that the system in place has produced exceptional benefits for this country. Because of it, I think we are more prosperous and thus better able to exercise the freedoms that you and I both value.
You, Anon, insist that any government funding of research is Communism or Socialism and smacks of “central planning.” You’ve made yourself clear. The “best” government funding of science, in your view, is none at all.
To me, that looks ideological.
Now consider your latest response to “Puzzled,” where you state that you are willing to turn an act of civil disobedience into an armed standoff, and I’d have to say calling you ideological is an understatement. Civil disobedience would be ideological, but what you claim to be willing to do is fanatical.
Anyway, do you agree that we have discussed our opposing views of government funding, irrespective of your plans to barricade yourself instead of paying taxes like the rest of us?
Fred Bortz — Science and technology books for young readers (www.fredbortz.com) and Science book reviews (www.scienceshelf.com)
Really. This is what I responded to…
The “courtesy” must be hidden somewhere else, I guess. Not to mention that the whole line is a confused strawman. That this discussion came up under an article on stem cells was incidental, but when people don’t think, these arguments often fall into factionalisms, which, of course, can only be answered by denying them both, or them all. As I said earlier, Bush’s failure (one of them) was in accepting the rationale for federal funding of science in general, and then grasping for faith-based arguments to deny one small component of it.
Other than that, Fred and I never got around to discussing the “best” way to support science. I only pointed out that the current method is not satisfactory, especially if one values certain little things like freedom, private property, and individual rights.
Then gadfly sez…
When the taxer threatens my very life if I don’t cough up.
The serfs might not render unto Caesar voluntarily, eh? Maybe Caesar would have to downsize the clownshow. You and Fred could take all the money you currently send in and shoot it over to whatever brand of stem cell research fits your fancy, though a certain reluctance might creep into your deliberations when you realize you’re not playing with other people’s money.
Anyway. So much for the hope of change. It’s you guys who are wedded, welded, shackled, yoked, and otherwise constrained to an ideology that is slowly failing, slowly suffocating the freedoms and, indeed, the entire economy as it runs along a path long ago foreseen by others not quite so wedded.
Yes, Fred is a saint, as far as I know, but I deem that gadfly has trouble with reading. I deliberately directed my criticisms concerning ladling from the cannibal pot at Margolis. Fred, however, even if he himself doesn’t partake from the pot, is still an avowed proponent of the practice. He ought to do us all a favor, throw off the status quo blinders, and get with the program of real hope and change.
Fred is courteous to a fault, thanking Anonymous for a respectful discussion. For that, he earns a Gadfly nip.
Anonymous replies with notable lack of courtesy by accusing Fred of advocating thievery:
Since when is taxation with representation thievery? And how would Anonymous propose we collect taxes without enforcement? For that he gets a Gadfly chomp.
As far as I know, Fred gets no research grants. He relies on the free market to sell his book ideas to publishers, who pay him for the right to produce his books and sell them on the free market.
Anonymous, if you think that the process of getting research grants consists of “having some beauty-contest-winning, glad handing, schmoozing, who-you-know-not-what-you-know bureauclown throwing darts (or counting bribes) attempting to pick winners and losers,” you have clearly not engaged in the process.
It may not be perfect, but the grant system is part of a free marketplace of ideas, where funding decisions are made based potential payoff and quality that impresses a panel of scientific and technological experts within the corporation or funding agency.
These bites of realism brought to you by “Gadfly.”
And if I refuse to be garnished or seized, and if I refuse to submit when the state comes to collect its fines or to imprison me, what is the penalty? The penalty is death. My home will be surrounded and a seige will begin, and if I continue to refuse to submit the eventual outcome will be my death. The sentence for refusing any decree in this country is ultimately death. The state will not be trifled with, upon pain of death. My house, my belongings, my very life are forfeit when the state comes a-calling.
That’s what you’ve made America into. That’s what the land of the free has become. So that certain politically annointed scientists can have front row seats at the big cannibal pot.
In response to Gadfly’s
Anonymous replies
The last time I checked, the U.S. government remedy for evading taxes (enacted with representation) starts with garnishment of wages and seizure of or liens against assets. Fines and imprisonment are also possible when people willfully refuse to pay taxes. But execution? Hardly!
I never approved of the Iraq War, but I paid my taxes, which have gone in part to supporting that war. Why? Because the dubiously but duly elected President requested the funds and Congress, which represents all of us, approved the funding.
I voiced my objection with my votes. Others voiced their objections by public statements and letters to congress.
Some may have voiced their objection by refusal to pay taxes in an act of civil disobedience. If so, they knowingly broke the law and understood the punishment that they were subjecting themselves to.
If Anonymous is willing to carry out such an act of civil disobedience to protest the government funding of science and is willing to accept the punishment mandated by law, then I commend him for acting out of conscience.
Unfortunately, Anonymous doesn’t strike me as a person of conscience, but rather as someone who uses his right of free speech to say outrageous things–like implying that the penalty for tax evasion is execution.
Anonymous, your statements leave me gasping in disbelief.
Call me Puzzled in Peoria (though I live elsewhere).