“The Dangerous and Sinful Practice of Inoculation.” (NYT op-ed)

[BurgherHoldtheLies]

A Pox on Stem Cell Research


By DEBORAH BLUM
Published: August 1, 2006
Madison, Wis.

IN vetoing legislation that would have supported medical research using embryonic stem cells, President Bush described his decision as moral rather than scientific, an act of conscience opposed to the taking of the “innocent human life” represented by embryonic stem cells. The potential of using these cells to develop life-saving medical cures, Mr. Bush said, was a temptation to be resisted.

The president’s veto appears to create an intractable problem for stem cell researchers and their advocates. How is the research to advance from hopeful to helpful when national policy inhibits the work from being done? Discouraged proponents have suggested that the president’s decision, which was applauded by conservative religious groups, has the potential to keep American science locked in the past.

The past, however, seems to encourage a more optimistic outlook. Medical progress has stirred religious and moral objections throughout history — objections that were overcome as the benefits of medical advances became overwhelmingly obvious. In the 11th century, European church leaders warned monks that treating illness with medicine showed such a lack of faith in God that it violated holy orders. When 19th-century doctors began using chloroform to alleviate the pain of childbirth, the Scottish Calvinist church declared it a “Satanic invention” intended to frustrate the Lord’s design.

An illuminating case study is the late 18th-century controversy over inoculation against smallpox. Condemned by clerics as both immoral and blasphemous, smallpox inoculation offers some surprising parallels to our current impasse over research using embryonic stem cells.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/01/opinion/01blum.html?_r=2&oref=slogin&oref=slogin

Good analogy to the past intrusion of the religious zealots against advancements of science. Science eventually wins.

[n2doc]

1. K and R for interesting article! n/t

[Warpy]

2. Hyper religious men are always leery of anything

that interferes with gawd's will to make us miserable, it seems. I'd read about the inoculation "controversy" while in nursing school. It seems quaint now, but at the time it was just as vehemently argued as any reproductive medicine is now.

When the clergy saw inoculation work and their own children grow up healthy and unscarred, they hushed up fast.

Reproductive medicine is different, though. It's tailor made for the smug religious Luddites out there. Men don't need it, so it's never going to affect them directly, one way or another. The worst part of denying women the care they need is the fact that an old wife may need to be replaced with a younger model, and that means a period of inconvenience and expensive household help, but the prize is a young chick to do all the work the old wife did, and she was getting shabby anyway. Because they're anatomically exempt from ever needing any of it, they can rail away at it to their black hearts' content.

I have never understood people who want us to wring the last drop of bitterness out of life, to wallow in every bit of misery microbes and men send us. They successfully hide behind the bible and the cross (or the Koran and the crescent or any of a dozen symbols) and most people don't realize that's what they're doing.

It's high time we educate them, I think. Ridicule is our friend, respect is our enemy. Religious Luddites don't deserve respect.

[BurgherHoldtheLies]

3. "You don't have to teach both sides of a debate, if one side is...CRAP!"

Bill Maher quote from his new rules. The actual quote is: "You don't have to teach both sides of a debate, if one side is a load of crap."

Too much respect given for nonsense.

[BurgherHoldtheLies]

4. kick

:kick:

[roseBudd]

5. And lightning rods were once considered to be thwarting god's will to burn

people alive in their homes

Meteorites? God throwing rocks at sinners.

[Vanje]

6. Save the SPERM!

They are alive. They are human!
Millions are killed every day.
STOP the gENOCIDE!