Bush dismisses 2 members from bioethics panel

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"We now know how President Bush responds to highly publicized charges that he's stacking scientific advisory panels: He gives his critics the finger and stacks another one. This morning the news broke that Bush has removed two important dissenters from the President's Council on Bioethics, one of them being the scientist and telomere expert Elizabeth Blackburn, who just so happens to be one of the most outspoken defenders of stem cell research on the panel. And Bush has replaced these thinkers with people who are much more inclined to parrot the administration's line on key issues."

Their suggested letter to your elected representatives:

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Like many who look forward to a longer, healthier future of better medicine, I am appalled by the actions of President Bush with regard to stem cell and therapeutic cloning research. These fields provide the fundamental technologies required for regenerative medicine that promises near term cures for Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, nerve damage, heart disease, diabetes, blindness, deafness and many other age-related conditions.

The President's recent action to further stack the deck in the President's Council for Bioethics really takes the cake, however. The President has removed two important members from the President's Council on Bioethics, one of them being the scientist and telomere expert Elizabeth Blackburn, who just so happens to be one of the most outspoken defenders of stem cell research on the panel.

The Bioethics Council did not give the President the answer he wanted to hear with its most recent report "Monitoring Stem Cell Research," despite the overwhelming anti-research bias already present. The case for research is just too strong, as I am sure you are aware. The number of lives that could soon be saved is staggering, as are the costs of delay. Now the President has demonstrated that he already knows the answer he wants to hear, and he will brazenly go ahead to make sure that this is the answer he receives. What happened to listening to your advisors first?

There is only one answer to this sort of behavior: the President's Council on Bioethics must be abolished and condemned in the strongest language possible. It is now nothing more than a rubber stamp for continuing attempts to ban and criminalize the most promising fields of medical research. Please represent your constituents in this matter and speak out in defense of research, in defense of curing disease, and in defense of longer, healthier lives.
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"This move does tend to telegraph that the Bush administration intends to push through with bans on this research in the US and at the UN. Ugly stuff, considering the costs"
(http://www.fightaging.org/archives/000020.php ).

http://www.tnr.com/story_print.html?id=d8731cf4-e87b-4d88-b7e7-f5059cd0bfbd

best article ive ever read on bioethics

Worst of all from this point of view are those more uncivilized forms of eating, like licking an ice cream cone--a catlike activity that has been made acceptable in informal America but that still offends those who know eating in public is offensive. ... Eating on the street--even when undertaken, say, because one is between appointments and has no other time to eat--displays a lack of self-control: It beckons enslavement to the belly. ... Lacking utensils for cutting and lifting to mouth, he will often be seen using his teeth for tearing off chewable portions, just like any animal. ... This doglike feeding, if one must engage in it, ought to be kept from public view, where, even if we feel no shame, others are compelled to witness our shameful behavior.

WTF?? These people are not just asshole conservatives, they are radically batshit crazy. Oh wait...

Dude's probably constantly washing his jeans...

steve shasta?

Socially Acceptable Street Foods

Thanks for the link, dude, good read.

i never thought about this but are you like all interested in this shit since you work in the eye blackmarket from bladerunner?

hahaha yeah I dunno, I think I have more of an interest in it based on the political context of stuff outlined in that article and my wife being a biologist than because of my job. I don't know if anyone these days feels real ethical compunction about (legal and regulated) organ transplant unless you, like, believe that you need all of your 2,000 parts in one place in order to take them to heaven with you.

lol jehovahs witnesses

I never realized the link between what I just posted upthread and that other thread. Thanks Nicole.

There's also this interview with Leon Kass from Discover magazine a few months ago. Lots of dumbshittery in there, too, capped off by, "The point is that no child conceived with the aid of assisted reproductive technologies should be denied the lineage and biological ties to two parents that all children born 'naturally' have. No child should have to say, 'An embryo was my father.'"

waht

thanks for this link!! gonna send it to my dad, who is kind of involved with bioethics stuff.

the ice cream thing is so unbelievably WTF.

http://sol.sci.uop.edu/~jfalward/jesusmanger.gif