Never say that censorship and bureaucratic grandstanding haven’t given you anything.
It was announced today that scientists have discovered a way to turn existing cells into stem cells. And naturally, the Christian Right — the very same folks who came up with the GOP’s anti-abortion, pro-death penalty logic — have no problem playing god with cells after they become skin cells… just not before.
Stem cells, as everyone who doesn’t go to private a Christian school knows, are cells which can be turned into any other kind of cell we want. You don’t need much of an imagination to know that the potential for “programmable cells” is boundless–from building skin grafts from scratch to curing cancer.
The only problem with stem cell research was the fact that you couldn’t “reverse” cells that had already formed, making blank cells out of skin or muscle tissue. You had to use fetus tissue, you see. And that didn’t sit very well with the good ol’ Christian fundamentalists, including our oh-so-devout Commander in Chief. So it was banned.
Well, as Dr. Ian Malcom reminds us, life tends to find a way. Science, in particular, pays no attention to what it’s told that it cannot do. Now, they’ve been able to reverse the aging process of cells, and turn them into new, malleable, potentially disease-curing stem cells.
And naturally, the
Related Posts:
0 Responses
Stay in touch with the conversation, subscribe to the RSS feed for comments on this post.