FAITH AND SCIENCE

Trading Places
Will the secular left soon attack
the religious right for being pro-science?
BY JOSEPH BOTTUM
Wednesday, November 28, 2007



If the news of major breakthroughs in cell research should turn out to be correct, we are about to witness something like victory in the fight over embryonic stem cells.

And that will open a nest of interesting questions, beginning with this one: All those editorialists and columnists who have, over the past 10 years, howled and howled about Luddites and religious fanatics thwarting science and frustrating medicine - were they really interested in technology and health, or were they just using all that as a handy stick with which to whack their political opponents?

The news actually broke this summer, when Japanese researcher Shinya Yamanaka announced that he had found a technique to transform cultured mouse skin cells into cells nearly identical to embryonic stem cells.

As Nature magazine pointed out, if something similar works in humans, a simple skin biopsy could be used to create embryonic stem-cell equivalents "without using embryos or even eggs."

But the topic has bubbled up again with the report from London's Daily Telegraph that Ian Wilmut, the cloner of Dolly the sheep and the world's most famous biological researcher, is abandoning cloning. Instead, he's chosen to follow Mr. Yamanaka's lead: "a way," as the Telegraph explained, "to create human embryo stem cells without the need for human eggs, which are in extremely short supply, and without the need to create and destroy human cloned embryos, which is bitterly opposed by the prolife movement."

Mr. Yamanaka's research has received at least one confirmation from an American team, and though the technical details of his "de-differentiation" method are not yet completely clear, the first reports are very promising.

Certainly more promising than cloning. A report in Nature -much-ballyhooed by the press -announced the confirmation by an Australian team of the successful cloning of monkey embryos for the creation of embryonic stem cells.

But the reported success rate was just 0.07%, and the Japanese technique for de-differentiating fully formed adult cells back down to embryonic stem cells has already shown itself to work at a much, much higher rate.

In other words, scientists may now be able to have the embryonic stem cells we've been told they need for research--without creating and destroying embryos to get them. If so, the argument is over.

Or, maybe, the argument is just beginning, for this news turns on its head everything in what the nation's newspapers have delivered to us as a story of blinkered pro-lifers vs. courageous scientists.

The people who turn out actually to have believed in the power of science are the pro-lifers - the ones who said that a moral roadblock is not, in point of fact, an outrageous hindrance, for scientists will always find another, less-objectionable way to achieve their goals.

President Bush's refusal of federal funding for new embryonic stem cell lines didn't halt major stem-cell advances, any more than the prohibition against life-threatening research on human subjects, such as the infamous Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male, stopped the advance of medical treatments.

For those who attacked the pro-lifers in the name of science, however, things look a little different. As Maureen L. Condic explained to First Thigngs readers this year in her careful survey, "What We Know About Embryonic Stem Cells," the promises of medical breakthroughs were massively overblown by the media.

But there were reasons for all the hype. I have long suspected that science, in the context of the editorial page of the New York Times, was simply a stalking-horse for something else. In fact, for two something-elses: a chance to discredit America's religious believers, and an opportunity to put yet another hedge around the legalization of abortion.

After all, if our very health depends on the death of embryos, and we live in a culture that routinely destroys early human life in the laboratory, no grounds could exist for objecting to abortion.

With these purposes now severed by the Japanese de-differentiation technique, which way will it break?

The answer is, quite possibly, toward a rejection of science by the mainstream press. Since the 1960s, abortion has skewed American politics in strange and unnatural ways, and the cloning debates are no exception.

Recently John Tierney of the New York Times had a long article called "Are Scientists Playing God? It Depends on Your Religion." It's a little unfortunately timed, given the news from England about Mr. Wilmut's change of heart, but the theme is that American Christians and European post-Christians are unlike the Chinese, Koreans and other Easterners with no history of opposition to science.

The whole idea seems more than a little peculiar, when one reflects on the birthplaces of modern science. And yet, Mr. Tierney sees something that is, from his perspective, genuinely hard to explain: The left in America and Europe supports destructive embryonic research, while it increasingly rejects genetically modified "Frankenfoods."

Oh, he admits, there have been some "unlikely alliances." As he notes, "When conservative intellectuals like Francis Fukuyama campaigned for Congress to ban embryo cloning, some environmental activists like Jeremy Rifkin joined them. A Green Party leader in Germany, Voker Beck, referred to cloned embryonic stem-cell research as 'veiled cannibalism.'"

But he can't quite see how his description of these alliances as "unlikely" undermines his thesis that there's something philosophical that unites the Christian right with the post-Christian left, and makes them both different from the all-accepting Buddhist philosophies of the Far East.

Shake loose from the narrative of antiscience fundamentalists and pro-science liberals, however, and a different story starts to be visible. Abortion skewed the political discussion of all this, pinning the left to a defense of science it doesn't actually hold.

The more natural line is agitation against Frankenfoods and all genetic modification, particularly given the environmentalism to which the campaign against global warming is tying the left.
Narratives about positions on public policy are like enormous steamships: It takes a long time to turn them around.

But if the news of stem-cell breakthroughs prove accurate, we may well see over the next few years a gradual reversal in news stories and editorials. Watch for it, now that abortion is out of the equation: much less hype about all the miracle cures that stem cells will bring us, more suspicion about the cancers and genetic pollution that may result, and just about the same amount of bashing of religious believers--this time for their ignorant support of science.

Mr. Bottum is editor of First Things

Ethical Stem Cell Research Method
Conquers Cancer Concern, Cures Mice
by Steven Ertelt
LifeNews.com Editor
December 7, 2007


Washington, DC (LifeNews.com) - Two weeks ago, scientists from Japan and Wisconsin announced they had come up with a method of converting adult stem cells into an embryonic-like state.

The scientists have furthered their own work by showing that they can produce the iPS cells without the cancer gene that was a focus of concern.

After Dr. Yamanaka first announced that his team had created the "induced Pluripotent Stem cells" (iPS cells) directly from skin cells without having to destroy human embryos, some scientists discounted the value of iPS cells, claiming that they're a cancer risk.

They also claimed it could take years to prove that iPS cells are as useful as embryonic stem cells or cloning.

Last week, however, Dr. Yamanaka continued to silence critics by producing the cells without the cancer gene.

Now, scientists at MIT added to the growing list of iPS accomplishments by proving that these cells can be used to successfully treat of sickle cell anemia in mice. Researchers had tried the same experiment with cloning and failed.

"This is the first evaluation of these cells for therapy," said Dr. Jacob Hanna, who worked on the study with researchers at the Whitehead Institute of Biomedical Research in Cambridge.

Rudolf Jaenisch, a member of the Whitehead Institute team, told Reuters, "This demonstrates that iPS cells have the same potential for therapy as embryonic stem cells, without the ethical and practical issues raised in creating embryonic stem cells."

Pro-life groups applauded the news.

Tony Perkins, the head of the Family Research Council told LifeNews.com, "Let's not forget that this newfound success of iPS cells only adds to the long list of accomplishments of adult and cord blood stem cells, which are treating patients as we speak."

"Yet again, researchers are proving that the compatibility of science and ethics continues to be not only the most principled approach but also the most promising," he said.

Pope Benedict XVI's Message for the 2008 World Day of Peace devoted Paragraphs 7 and 8 to the problems of the environment and energy, which reflects this Pope's customary good sense in his approach to problems. Politicians, world leaders and opinion makers would do well to use common sense and not ideology in dealing with these issues.

---

The family, the human community
and the environment

7. The family needs a home, a fit environment in which to develop its proper relationships. For the human family, this home is the earth, the environment that God the Creator has given us to inhabit with creativity and responsibility.

We need to care for the environment: it has been entrusted to men and women to be protected and cultivated with responsible freedom, with the good of all as a constant guiding criterion. Human beings, obviously, are of supreme worth vis-à-vis creation as a whole.

Respecting the environment does not mean considering material or animal nature more important than man. Rather, it means not selfishly considering nature to be at the complete disposal of our own interests, for future generations also have the right to reap its benefits and to exhibit towards nature the same responsible freedom that we claim for ourselves. Nor must we overlook the poor, who are excluded in many cases from the goods of creation destined for all.

Humanity today is rightly concerned about the ecological balance of tomorrow. It is important for assessments in this regard to be carried out prudently, in dialogue with experts and people of wisdom, uninhibited by ideological pressure to draw hasty conclusions, and above all with the aim of reaching agreement on a model of sustainable development capable of ensuring the well-being of all while respecting environmental balances.

If the protection of the environment involves costs, they should be justly distributed, taking due account of the different levels of development of various countries and the need for solidarity with future generations.

Prudence does not mean failing to accept responsibilities and postponing decisions; it means being committed to making joint decisions after pondering responsibly the road to be taken, decisions aimed at strengthening that covenant between human beings and the environment, which should mirror the creative love of God, from whom we come and towards whom we are journeying.

8. In this regard, it is essential to “sense” that the earth is “our common home” and, in our stewardship and service to all, to choose the path of dialogue rather than the path of unilateral decisions.

Further international agencies may need to be established in order to confront together the stewardship of this “home” of ours; more important, however, is the need for ever greater conviction about the need for responsible cooperation.

The problems looming on the horizon are complex and time is short. In order to face this situation effectively, there is a need to act in harmony.

One area where there is a particular need to intensify dialogue between nations is that of the stewardship of the earth's energy resources. The technologically advanced countries are facing two pressing needs in this regard: on the one hand, to reassess the high levels of consumption due to the present model of development, and on the other hand to invest sufficient resources in the search for alternative sources of energy and for greater energy efficiency.

The emerging counties are hungry for energy, but at times this hunger is met in a way harmful to poor countries which, due to their insufficient infrastructures, including their technological infrastructures, are forced to undersell the energy resources they do possess. At times, their very political freedom is compromised by forms of protectorate or, in any case, by forms of conditioning which appear clearly humiliating.

---

In this connection, the latest scientific report on global warming is yet another repudiation of teh politically correct but ideologically biased view of Al Gore et alia.


Humans Not to Blame
for Global Warming, Study Says


A new study reveals that humans are not responsible for global warming and that the earth is not in a state of “planetary emergency.”

Climate scientists at the University of Rochester, University of Alabama and the University of Virginia reported in the International Journal of Climatology that atmospheric warming patterns over the last 30 years are not caused by greenhouse gas emissions. Rather, the current warming trend is most likely due to changes in the activity of the sun.

"We have to remember that the climate has always been changing ever since we have records," said S. Fred Singer, an author of the report. “We know that there have been huge climate changes on the earth long before human beings actually came into existence.”

The report, which challenges claims made by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, also shows that carbon dioxide is not a pollutant, and so current attempts to control CO2 emissions are ineffective, pointless and extremely costly.



This item comes from www.citizenlink.org/
but I am looking for a more extensive report.

The caveat still holds, nevertheless. Even if human activity is not the main agent for alarming climate changes, the human community should still moderate activities which tend to contribute to making the environment less favorable for the present and succeeding generations.

Children? Not if you love the planet
By MARK STEYN
Syndicated columnist
Friday, December 14, 2007


Canadian-born Steyn has been one of the most militant and persuasive 'prophets' of the demographic winter that afflicts the world's most affluent societies, and we have posted some iof his essays on the subject in this Forum. Here is another reflection appriopriate for the Christmas season, inw hich he also looks at the fallacies of the climate-change Cassandras.


This is the time of year, as Hillary Rodham Clinton once put it, when Christians celebrate "the birth of a homeless child" – or, in Al Gore's words, "a homeless woman gave birth to a homeless child."

Just for the record, Jesus wasn't "homeless." He had a perfectly nice home back in Nazareth. But he happened to be born in Bethlehem. It was census time, and Joseph was obliged to schlep halfway across the country to register in the town of his birth. Which is such an absurdly bureaucratic overregulatory cockamamie Big Government nightmare that it's surely only a matter of time before Massachusetts or California reintroduce it.

But the point is: The Christmas story isn't about affordable housing. Joseph and Mary couldn't get a hotel room – that's the only accommodation aspect of the event. Sen. Clinton and Vice President Gore are over-complicating things: Dec. 25 is not the celebration of "a homeless child," but a child, period.

Just for a moment, let us accept, as Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins and the other bestselling atheists insist, that what happened in Bethlehem two millennia is a lot of mumbo-jumbo. As I wrote a year ago, consider it not as an event but as a narrative: You want to launch a big new global movement from scratch. So what do you use?

The birth of a child. On the one hand, what could be more powerless than a newborn babe? On the other, without a newborn babe, man is ultimately powerless. For, without new life, there can be no civilization, no society, no nothing. Even if it's superstitious mumbo-jumbo, the decision to root Christ's divinity in the miracle of His birth expresses a profound – and rational – truth about "eternal life" here on Earth.

Last year I wrote a book on demographic decline and became a big demography bore, and it's tempting just to do an annual December audit on the demographic weakness of what we used to call Christendom.

Today, in the corporate headquarters of the Christian faith, Pope Benedict looks out of his window at a city where children's voices are rarer and rarer. Italy has one of the lowest birth rates in Europe. Go to a big rural family wedding: lots of aunts, uncles, grandmas, grandpas but ever fewer bambinos.

The International Herald Tribune last week carried the latest update on the remorseless geriatrification: On the Miss Italia beauty pageant, the median age of the co-hosts was 70; the country is second only to Sweden in the proportion of its population over 85, and has the fewest citizens under 15. Etc.

So in post-Catholic Italy there is no miracle of a child this Christmas – unless you count the 70 percent of Italians between the ages of 20 and 30 who still live at home, the world's oldest teenagers still trudging up the stairs to the room they slept in as a child even as they approach their fourth decade.

That's worth bearing in mind if you're an American gal heading to Rome on vacation: When that cool 29-year-old with the Mediterranean charm in the singles bar asks you back to his pad for a nightcap, it'll be his mom and dad's place.

I'm often told that my demographics-is-destiny argument is anachronistic: Countries needed manpower in the Industrial Age, when we worked in mills and factories. But now advanced societies are "knowledge economies," and they require fewer working stiffs.

Oddly enough, the Lisbon Council's European Human Capital Index, released in October, thinks precisely the opposite – that the calamitous decline in population will prevent Eastern and Central Europe from being able to function as "innovation economies." A "knowledge economy" will be as smart as the brains it can call on.

Meanwhile, a few Europeans are still having children: The British government just announced that Muhammad is now the most popular boy's name in the United Kingdom.

As I say, the above demographic audit has become something of an annual tradition in this space. But here's something new that took hold in the year 2007: A radical anti-humanism, long present just below the surface, bobbed up and became explicit and respectable.

In Britain, the Optimum Population Trust said that "the biggest cause of climate change is climate changers – in other words, human beings," and professor John Guillebaud called on Britons to voluntarily reduce the number of children they have.

Last week, in the Medical Journal of Australia, Barry Walters went further: To hell with this wimp-o pantywaist "voluntary" child-reduction. Professor Walters wants a "carbon tax" on babies, with, conversely, "carbon credits" for those who undergo sterilization procedures.

So that'd be great news for the female eco-activists recently profiled in London's Daily Mail who boast about how they'd had their tubes tied and babies aborted in order to save the planet.

"Every person who is born," says Toni Vernelli, "produces more rubbish, more pollution, more greenhouse gases and adds to the problem of overpopulation." We are the pollution, and sterilization is the solution. The best way to bequeath a more sustainable environment to our children is not to have any.

What's the "pro-choice" line? "Every child should be wanted"? Not anymore. The progressive position has subtly evolved: Every child should be unwanted.

By the way, if you're looking for some last-minute stocking stuffers, Oxford University Press has published a book by professor David Benatar of the University of Cape Town called Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence.

The author "argues for the 'anti-natal' view – that it is always wrong to have children … . Anti-natalism also implies that it would be better if humanity became extinct."

As does Alan Weisman's The World Without Us – which Publishers Weekly hails as "an enthralling tour of the world … anticipating, often poetically, what a planet without us would be like." It's a good thing it "anticipates" it poetically, because, once it happens, there will be no more poetry.

Lest you think the above are "extremists," consider how deeply invested the "mainstream" is in a total fiction.

At the recent climate jamboree in Bali, the Rev. Al Gore told the assembled faithful: "My own country, the United States, is principally responsible for obstructing progress here." Really? The American Thinker's Web site ran the numbers.

In the seven years between the signing of Kyoto in 1997 and 2004, here's what happened:

•Emissions worldwide increased 18.0 percent;

•Emissions from countries that signed the treaty increased 21.1 percent;

•Emissions from nonsigners increased 10.0 percent; and

•Emissions from the United States increased 6.6 percent.

It's hard not to conclude a form of mental illness has gripped the world's elites.

If you're one of that dwindling band of Westerners who'll be celebrating the birth of a child, "homeless" or otherwise, next week, make the most of it. A year or two on, and the eco-professors will propose banning Nativity scenes because they set a bad example.

Beginning Life in a Test Tube:
Dangers and Limitations of IVF
By Father John Flynn, LC


ROME, DEC. 16, 2007 (Zenit.org).- The Catholic Church has often warned of the moral perils associated with in-vitro fertilization (IVF) techniques. In addition, the processes involved bring with them a series of medical dangers, both for women and their offspring.

One of these risks is the threat of genetically-related illnesses stemming from donated eggs or sperm. The Los Angeles Times published on Dec. 8 a special report on the problems suffered by a couple who have a child born from an egg donated by Alexandra Gammelgard.

To pay for college, Gammelgard sold her eggs to agencies that led to at least 4 children. One of these donations resulted in a child whose birth was arranged by a homosexual couple, Bruce Steiger and Rick Karl. It later turned out that the child suffers from Tay-Sachs, a neurological disease that usually kills its victims before age 5.

Gammelgard is a carrier of the genetic mutation, but was unaware of it at the time she sold her eggs. The other couples who have children resulting from the ova donated by Gammelgard remain unaware of the risks. Even if their children do not develop the illness they will, in turn, run the risk of passing it on to the next generation.

This would not happen with blood donations, the Los Angeles Times noted, as donors and their blood is tracked so recipients can be warned in the case of dangers discovered after donation.

The laws regulating in-vitro (IVF), by contrast, privilege confidentiality, and there is no guarantee users of donated eggs or sperm will be told if it is discovered later on that a donor has serious health problems.

According to the Los Angeles Times, the number of children born in the U.S. from donated eggs reached about 6,500 in 2005. Donated sperm is more common, leading to tens of thousands of births each year.

Couples can also have their hopes falsely raised by the continual announcements of new IVF treatments, warned an article published Nov. 15 in the Wall Street Journal. In October a new embryo-screening technique was unveiled, immediately winning a prize from the American Society for Reproductive Medicine (ASRM).

At the same time, however, a group of experts from the ASRM, along with the Society for Assisted Reproductive Technology, published a statement urging caution about certain kinds of genetic embryo screening, saying there is insufficient scientific evidence about its usefulness.

The Wall Street Journal also noted that a recent study in the New England Journal of Medicine questioned the usefulness of advanced fertility treatments for many patients. Such procedures are often proffered to couples, playing on their fears of remaining without children, but they have no guarantee of success, and cost thousands of dollars.

The ASRM also warned, the Associated Press reported Oct. 22, that women should not place too much trust in frozen eggs. So far there have only been around 500 births from frozen-and-thawed eggs worldwide.

Due to problems with ice crystals forming in the freezing process the eggs may be rendered useless. The ASRM explained that the freezing technique, which can cost more than $10,000, may only have a 2%-4% chance of a live birth for every thawed egg.

Doctors in Ireland also expressed concerns, the Irish Times reported Sept. 11. Next year, two British clinics are set to introduce in Ireland the possibility for women to freeze eggs using the vitrification process.

Already the Human Assisted Reproduction Ireland at the Rotunda Hospital in Dublin offers women the possibility to freeze eggs using another method, the slow-freeze process. Dr. Edgar Mocanu, a consultant with the Rotunda center, warned that the new technique was still experimental and there is no data available yet on possible health problems for the babies born as a result of the process.

A further concern is whether the promotion of egg freezing will induce women to postpone pregnancy. Dr. Aongus Nolan, lab director at the University College Hospital Galway Fertility Unit, told the Irish Times that, apart from concerns over the survival of frozen eggs, the longer women wait the more difficult it will be for them to become pregnant.

Another problem area is the tendency of IVF procedures to result in the birth of twins. Walter Merricks, the interim director of the United Kingdom's Human Fertilization and Embryology Authority, called for a reduction in multiple births, the Guardian reported Dec. 4.

Currently, IVF in the United Kingdom accounts for nearly 1 in 5 of the overall number of multiple births, due to women being implanted with 2 or 3 embryos during fertility treatment.

The Guardian article observed that twin births are the single biggest risk factor for babies born through IVF. Dangers include premature birth, low birth weight, cerebral palsy, heart disease and diabetes.

In the United States, according to an article published Nov. 20 by the Philadelphia Inquirer newspaper, twins have made up about 44% of all IVF births. The newspaper cited a 2004 report by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in which researchers commented that in order to boast of high success rates for IVF treatments, clinics tend to favor the implantation of multiple embryos.

Apart from problems due to multiple births, children born from IVF techniques tend to suffer more health problems in general. On July 23 the U.K. newspaper the Daily Mail reported on figures published in the medical journal Human Reproduction.

A study carried out by the Imperial College London on almost 900 children found that on average, a 7-year-old conceived after fertility treatment had been in hospital 1.76 times - while a child conceived naturally had been admitted only once. By the age of 7, IVF children had spent an average of 4.31 days in hospital, almost two days longer than other children.

Fits and other conditions affecting the brain were more common in those born after IVF treatment. The immune system was also affected, with IVF children being more prone to infections, asthma and rheumatoid arthritis. While some of the problems could be related to multiple births, the study also found that single children born as a result of IVF were also less healthy than naturally conceived offspring.

Mothers are also at risk, reported the Los Angeles Times on Dec. 3. One of the major problems stems from the number of pregnancies at an older age. Births for U.S.-born women in California aged 40-44 have increased threefold since 1982.

Older mothers are more likely to develop high blood pressure and gestational diabetes and to give birth to premature and low birth-weight babies, the article warned. It also cited a 2004 study of Swedish women, which found that the rate of premature births for women ages 40-44 to be 150% higher than for women 20-29.

Couples who discover they cannot bear children suffer greatly, acknowledges the Catechism of the Catholic Church, No. 2374. Nevertheless, methods aimed at overcoming such problems should be placed at the service of the human person and their rights, as well as respecting the bond between husband and wife and the nature of the sexual act, the following paragraphs explain.

A child is a gift, not a piece of property, and possesses rights that should be respected, adds No. 2378. A teaching whose wisdom is being confirmed more and more as complications from IVF emerge.


=====================================================================

*Just to put things in persepctive:

I do not know how California regulates its clinics, but New York State - whose manual of regulations governing doctors' offices and laboratories is quite hefty, and which in my work with a women's clinic, I need to refer to every so often to make sure we are fully compliant - is very specific about the battery of tests it requires for donors of any tissue or body parts whatsoever, whether it is blood, sperm, eggs or organs for transplant.

Failure to comply - and believe me, the Department of Health inspectors, who go around inspecting clinics once a year in order for the clinic to keep its licenses, are extremely scrupulous and require that every test, step and action taken is duly reported and recorded - has serious consequences.

Any tissue or organ donor is routinely required, among other tests, to undergo genetic tests to rule out the presence of genes for diseases known to be associated with the donor's racial origin (Causasian, Mediterranean, African, Asian, Jewish, etc).

Certainly, any patient of Jewish ancestry would be tested first for Tay-Sachs and 5-6 other Jewish-associated disease genes.

In fact, a doctor is required to order these race-associated gene testing even for ordinary couples wanting to start a family who consult to get a diagnosis for why they are not succeeding to get pregnant.

Clearly, someone failed to do basic testing in the Gammelgard case cited.

CREATING NEW LIFE FORMS ARTIFICIALLY
POSES BIO'TERROR' AND 'BIO-ERROR'

Synthetic DNA on the Brink
of Yielding New Life Forms
By Rick Weiss
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, December 17, 2007



It has been 50 years since scientists first created DNA in a test tube, stitching ordinary chemical ingredients together to make life's most extraordinary molecule.

Until recently, however, even the most sophisticated laboratories could make only small snippets of DNA - an extra gene or two to be inserted into corn plants, for example, to help the plants ward off insects or tolerate drought.

Now researchers are poised to cross a dramatic barrier: the creation of life forms driven by completely artificial DNA.

Scientists in Maryland have already built the world's first entirely handcrafted chromosome - a large looping strand of DNA made from scratch in a laboratory, containing all the instructions a microbe needs to live and reproduce.

In the coming year, they hope to transplant it into a cell, where it is expected to "boot itself up," like software downloaded from the Internet, and cajole the waiting cell to do its bidding.

And while the first synthetic chromosome is a plagiarized version of a natural one, others that code for life forms that have never existed before are already under construction.

The cobbling together of life from synthetic DNA, scientists and philosophers agree, will be a watershed event, blurring the line between biological and artificial - and forcing a rethinking of what it means for a thing to be alive.

"This raises a range of big questions about what nature is and what it could be," said Paul Rabinow, an anthropologist at the University of California at Berkeley who studies science's effects on society. "Evolutionary processes are no longer seen as sacred or inviolable. People in labs are figuring them out so they can improve upon them for different purposes."

That unprecedented degree of control over creation raises more than philosophical questions, however. What kinds of organisms will scientists, terrorists and other creative individuals make? How will these self-replicating entities be contained? And who might end up owning the patent rights to the basic tools for synthesizing life?

Some experts are worried that a few maverick companies are already gaining monopoly control over the core "operating system" for artificial life and are poised to become the Microsofts of synthetic biology. That could stifle competition, they say, and place enormous power in a few people's hands.

"We're heading into an era where people will be writing DNA programs like the early days of computer programming, but who will own these programs?" asked Drew Endy, a scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

At the core of synthetic biology's new ascendance are high-speed DNA synthesizers that can produce very long strands of genetic material from basic chemical building blocks: sugars, nitrogen-based compounds and phosphates.

Today a scientist can write a long genetic program on a computer just as a maestro might compose a musical score, then use a synthesizer to convert that digital code into actual DNA. Experiments with "natural" DNA indicate that when a faux chromosome gets plopped into a cell, it will be able to direct the destruction of the cell's old DNA and become its new "brain" - telling the cell to start making a valuable chemical, for example, or a medicine or a toxin, or a bio-based gasoline substitute.

Unlike conventional biotechnology, in which scientists induce modest genetic changes in cells to make them serve industrial purposes, synthetic biology involves the large-scale rewriting of genetic codes to create metabolic machines with singular purposes.

"I see a cell as a chassis and power supply for the artificial systems we are putting together," said Tom Knight of MIT, who likes to compare the state of cell biology today to that of mechanical engineering in 1864.

That is when the United States began to adopt standardized thread sizes for nuts and bolts, an advance that allowed the construction of complex devices from simple, interchangeable parts.

If biology is to morph into an engineering discipline, it is going to need similarly standardized parts, Knight said. So he and colleagues have started a collection of hundreds of interchangeable genetic components they call BioBricks, which students and others are already popping into cells like Lego pieces.

So far, synthetic biology is still semi-synthetic, involving single-cell organisms such as bacteria and yeast that have a blend of natural and synthetic DNA. The cells can reproduce, a defining trait of life. But in many cases that urge has been genetically suppressed, along with other "distracting" biological functions, to maximize productivity.

"Most cells go about life like we do, with the intention to make more of themselves after eating," said John Pierce, a vice president at DuPont in Wilmington, Del., a leader in the field. "But what we want them to do is make stuff we want."

J. Craig Venter, chief executive of Synthetic Genomics in Rockville, knows what he wants his cells to make: ethanol, hydrogen and other exotic fuels for vehicles, to fill a market that has been estimated to be worth $1 trillion.

In a big step toward that goal, Venter has now built the first fully artificial chromosome, a strand of DNA many times longer than anything made by others and laden with all the genetic components a microbe needs to get by.

Details of the process are under wraps until the work is published, probably early next year. But Venter has already shown that he can insert a "natural" chromosome into a cell and bring it to life. If a synthetic chromosome works the same way, as expected, the first living cells with fully artificial genomes could be growing in dishes by the end of 2008.

The plan is to mass-produce a plain genetic platform able to direct the basic functions of life, then attach custom-designed DNA modules that can compel cells to make synthetic fuels or other products.

It will be a challenge to cultivate fuel-spewing microbes, Venter acknowledged. Among other problems, he said, is that unless the fuel is constantly removed, "the bugs will basically pickle themselves."

But the hurdles are not insurmountable. LS9 Inc., a company in San Carlos, Calif., is already using E. coli bacteria that have been reprogrammed with synthetic DNA to produce a fuel alternative from a diet of corn syrup and sugar cane. So efficient are the bugs' synthetic metabolisms that LS9 predicts it will be able to sell the fuel for just $1.25 a gallon.

At a DuPont plant in Tennessee, other semi-synthetic bacteria are living on cornstarch and making the chemical 1,3 propanediol, or PDO. Millions of pounds of the stuff are being spun and woven into high-tech fabrics (DuPont's chief executive wears a pinstripe suit made of it), putting the bug-begotten chemical on track to become the first $1 billion biotech product that is not a pharmaceutical.

Engineers at DuPont studied blueprints of E. coli's metabolism and used synthetic DNA to help the bacteria make PDO far more efficiently than could have been done with ordinary genetic engineering.

"If you want to sell it at a dollar a gallon . . . you need every bit of efficiency you can muster," said DuPont's Pierce. "So we're running these bugs to their limits."

Yet another application is in medicine, where synthetic DNA is allowing bacteria and yeast to produce the malaria drug artemisinin far more efficiently than it is made in plants, its natural source.

Bugs such as these will seem quaint, scientists say, once fully synthetic organisms are brought on line to work 24/7 on a range of tasks, from industrial production to chemical cleanups. But the prospect of a flourishing synbio economy has many wondering who will own the valuable rights to that life.

In the past year, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has been flooded with aggressive synthetic-biology claims. Some of Venter's applications, in particular, "are breathtaking in their scope," said Knight. And with Venter's company openly hoping to develop "an operating system for biologically-based software," some fear it is seeking synthetic hegemony.

"We've asked our patent lawyers to be reasonable and not to be overreaching," Venter said. But competitors such as DuPont, he said, "have just blanketed the field with patent applications."

Safety concerns also loom large. Already a few scientists have made viruses from scratch. The pending ability to make bacteria -- which, unlike viruses, can live and reproduce in the environment outside of a living body - raises new concerns about contamination, contagion and the potential for mischief.

"Ultimately synthetic biology means cheaper and widely accessible tools to build bioweapons, virulent pathogens and artificial organisms that could pose grave threats to people and the planet," concluded a recent report by the Ottawa-based ETC Group, one of dozens of advocacy groups that want a ban on releasing synthetic organisms pending wider societal debate and regulation.

"The danger is not just bio-terror but bio-error," the report says.

Many scientists say the threat has been overblown. Venter notes that his synthetic genomes are spiked with special genes that make the microbes dependent on a rare nutrient not available in nature. And Pierce, of DuPont, says the company's bugs are too spoiled to survive outdoors.

"They are designed to grow in a cosseted environment with very high food levels," Pierce said. "You throw this guy out on the ground, he just can't compete. He's toast."

"We've heard that before," said Jim Thomas, ETC Group's program manager, noting that genes engineered into crops have often found their way into other plants despite assurances to the contrary. "The fact is, you can build viruses, and soon bacteria, from downloaded instructions on the Internet," Thomas said. "Where's the governance and oversight?"

In fact, government controls on trade in dangerous microbes do not apply to the bits of DNA that can be used to create them. And while some industry groups have talked about policing the field themselves, the technology is quickly becoming so simple, experts say, that it will not be long before "bio hackers" working in garages will be downloading genetic programs and making them into novel life forms.

"The cat is out of the bag," said Jay Keasling, chief of synthetic biology at the University of California at Berkeley.

Andrew Light, an environmental ethicist at the University of Washington in Seattle, said synthetic biology poses a conundrum because of its double-edged ability to both wreak biological havoc and perhaps wean civilization from dirty 20th-century technologies and petroleum-based fuels.

"For the environmental community, I think this is going to be a really hard choice," Light said.

Depending on how people adjust to the idea of man-made life - and on how useful the first products prove to be - the field could go either way, Light said.

"It could be that synthetic biology is going to be like cellphones: so overwhelming and ubiquitous that no one notices it anymore. Or it could be like abortion - the kind of deep disagreement that will not go away."

The question, if the abortion model holds, is which side of the synthetic biology debate will get to call itself "pro-life."

Scientists doubt climate change
By S.A. Miller
Washington Times (DC)
December 21, 2007


More than 400 scientists challenge claims by former Vice President Al Gore and the United Nations about the threat of man-made global warming, a new Senate minority report says.

The scientists — many of whom are current or former members of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that shares the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with Mr. Gore for publicizing a climate crisis — cast doubt on the "scientific consensus" that man-made global warming imperils the planet.

"I find the Doomsday picture Al Gore is painting — a six-meter sea level rise, 15 times the IPCC number — entirely without merit," said Dutch atmospheric scientist Hendrik Tennekes, one of the researchers quoted in the report by Republican staff of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee.

"I protest vigorously the idea that the climate reacts like a home heating system to a changed setting of the thermostat: just turn the dial, and the desired temperature will soon be reached," Mr. Tennekes said in the report.

Sen. James M. Inhofe of Oklahoma, ranking Republican on the Environment and Public Works Committee, said the report debunks Mr. Gore's claim that the "debate is over."

"The endless claims of a 'consensus' about man-made global warming grow less-and-less credible every day," he said.

After a quick review of the report, Gore spokeswoman Kalee Kreider said 25 or 30 of the scientists may have received funding from Exxon Mobil Corp.

Exxon Mobil spokesman Gantt H. Walton dismissed the accusation, saying the company is concerned about climate-change issues and does not pay scientists to bash global-warming theories.

"Recycling of that kind of discredited conspiracy theory is nothing more than a distraction from the real challenge facing society and the energy industry," he said. "And that challenge is how are we going to provide the energy needed to support economic and social development while reducing greenhouse-gas emissions."

The Republican report comes on the heels of Saturday's United Nations climate conference in Bali, Indonesia, where conferees adopted a plan to negotiate a new pact to create verifiable measurements to fight global warming in two years.

In the Senate report, environmental scientist David W. Schnare of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency said he was skeptical because "conclusions about the cause of the apparent warming stand on the shoulders of incredibly uncertain data and models. ... As a policy matter, one has to be less willing to take extreme actions when data are highly uncertain."

The hundreds of others in the report — climatologists, oceanographers, geologists, glaciologists, physicists and paleoclimatologists — voice varying degrees of criticism of the popular global-warming theory.

Their testimony challenges the idea that the climate-change debate is "settled" and runs counter to the claim that the number of skeptical scientists is dwindling.

The report's authors expect some of the scientists will recant their remarks under intense pressure from the public and from within professional circles to conform to the global-warming theory, a committee staffer said.

Several scientists in the report said many colleagues share their skepticism about man-made climate change but don't speak out publicly for fear of retribution, according to the report.

"Many of my colleagues with whom I spoke share these views and report on their inability to publish their skepticism in the scientific or public media," atmospheric scientist Nathan Paldor, professor of Dynamical Meteorology and Physical Oceanography at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, said in the report.

The IPCC has about 2,500 members.

The following are comments from some of the more than 400 scientists in a Republican report on global warming:

•"Even if the concentration of 'greenhouse gases' double, man would not perceive the temperature impact."
Oleg Sorochtin
Institute of Oceanology
Russian Academy of Sciences


•"I find the Doomsday picture Al Gore is painting — a six-meter sea level rise, 15 times the [U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] number — entirely without merit. ... I protest vigorously the idea that the climate reacts like a home heating system to a changed setting of the thermostat: just turn the dial, and the desired temperature will soon be reached."
Hendrik Tennekes
former research director
Netherlands' Royal National Meteorological Institute


•"The hypothesis that solar variability and not human activity is warming the oceans goes a long way to explain the puzzling idea that the Earth's surface may be warming while the atmosphere is not. The [greenhouse-gas] hypothesis does not do this. ... The public is not well served by this constant drumbeat of false alarms fed by computer models manipulated by advocates."
David Wojick
Expert reviewer for
U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change


•"The media is promoting an unprecedented hyping related to global warming. The media and many scientists are ignoring very important facts that point to a natural variation in the climate system as the cause of the recent global warming."
Eugenio Hackbart
Chief Meteorologist
MetSul Meteorologia Weather Center
Sao Leopoldo-Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil


•"There's no need to be worried. It's very interesting to study [climate change], but there's no need to be worried."
Anton Uriarte
Professor of Physical Geography
University of the Basque Country, Spain


Source:
Sen. James M. Inhofe of Oklahoma
Ranking Republican
Environment and Public Works Committee

A win for science - and human dignity
by Father Raymond J. De Souza
National Post (Canada)
December 20, 2007


As we move into the retrospective season on 2007, there will be lists aplenty about the major stories of the past year. Herewith let me nominate my candidate, a good news story that may well reconfigure major issues on the public agenda for years to come.

It's a health story, a science story, a morality story and a human dignity story: the stem cell breakthrough reported last month in research papers by Dr. Shinya Yamanaka and Dr. James Thomson.

For years, there have been high expectations for future therapies resulting from the use of embryonic stem cells, which, being "pluripotent," can be transformed into virtually any kind of body tissue.

The insuperable ethical problem is that harvesting such cells requires the destruction of the embryo - life must be taken so that life might (potentially) be saved.

The good news last month was that pluripotent stem cells could be obtained from human skin cells (fibroblasts). The technique involves introducing four genes into the skin cells, which are thereby "reprogrammed" to mimic embryonic stem cells.

The news has already had positive effects in terms of avoiding the needless creation and destruction of embryos for research purposes. The researcher who gave us Dolly, the cloned sheep, Dr. Ian Wilmut, has since decided not to pursue human cloning through the use of pluripotent stem cells from embryos - even though he has a British licence to do so. He will now focus on reprogramming as the superior scientific technique.

There does need to be some caution. Embryonic stem cells, to date, have not produced a single therapeutic cure - not one. There has been much propaganda on this issue, often led by celebrities such as Christopher Reeve and Michael J. Fox, pretending that embryonic stem cell therapies were just around the corner. That's not the case.

And the fact that pluripotent stem cells can be got elsewhere does not mean that they will be any more useful for medical therapies than the embryonic stem cells they mimic.

Yet the news is already enormously significant in that it brings clarity to related moral issues. The deliberate confusion and obfuscation over human cloning should now cease. To get over the public's general revulsion to cloning, advocates introduced the specious distinction between "therapeutic cloning" and "reproductive cloning."

What is proposed to be done in both cases is exactly the same - to create a clone; "therapeutic" simply means it is destroyed for its stem cells, while "reproductive" means that it is allowed to develop, a la Dolly. If there is no need of embryos as a source for pluripotent cells, then there is no need for "therapeutic" cloning.

The brave new world of cloning should be held at bay - at least for a little while longer.

Cloning still remains a potential future source of embryos. Because there is an elementary moral objection to creating embryos solely to be destroyed in the course of research, some scientists have turned to "surplus embryos," left over after fertility treatments. The argument is that their destruction for research is better than letting them remain frozen or be otherwise discarded.

2007 stem cell breakthrough
is like turning lead into gold


CHICAGO, Dec. 27 (AFP) — It was the kind of breakthrough scientists had dreamed of for decades and its promise to help cure disease appears to be fast on the way to being realized.

Researchers in November announced they were able to turn the clock back on skin cells and transform them into stem cells, the mutable building blocks of organs and tissues.

Then just earlier this month a different team announced it had cured sickle cell anemia in mice using stem cells derived from adult mouse skin.

"This is truly the Holy Grail: To be able to take a few cells from a patient -- say a cheek swab or few skin cells -- and turn them into stem cells in the laboratory," said Robert Lanza, a stem cell pioneer at Advanced Cell Technology.

"This work represents a tremendous scientific milestone - the biological equivalent of the Wright Brothers' first airplane," he told AFP.

"It's bit like learning how to turn lead into gold."

Stem cells offer enormous potential for curing and treating disease because they can be transformed into any cell in the body and then hopefully used to replace damaged or diseased cells, tissues and organs.

But stem cell research has been highly controversial because -- until now -- viable embryos had to be destroyed to extract the stem cells.

US President George W. Bush has banned all federal funding for research on human embryonic stem cells and access to stem cells in other countries has also been restricted because of the difficulty in finding women willing to donate their eggs.

The new technique, while far from perfected, is so promising that the man who managed to clone the world's first sheep, Dolly, is giving up his work cloning embryos to focus on studying stem cells derived from skin cells.

"The fact that (the) introduction of a small number of proteins into adult human cells could produce cells that are equivalent to embryo stem cells takes us into an entirely new era of stem cell biology," said Ian Wilmut, the Scottish researcher who first created a viable clone by transferring a cell nucleus into a new embryo.

One of the greatest advantages of the new technique is its simplicity: it takes just four genes to turn the skin cell back into a stem cell.

This, unlike the complex and expensive process developed by Wilmut, can be done in a standard biological lab. And skin cells are much easier to harvest than embryos.

"It's an explosion of resources," said Konrad Hochedlinger, of the Harvard Stem Cell Institute.

Prior to this discovery, researchers who wanted to look at how diseases developed would usually have to study animals or organs harvested from cadavers because embryonic stem cells were so hard to use and access.

But with stem cells derived from skin, tissues and organs can be grown in a petri dish, making it easier for researchers to map the genetic structure of diseased cells, a process which could unlock a cure.

They could also allow researchers to do chemical screens to identify drugs which may cure or treat a disease, a process which could significantly speed up the process of bringing life-saving drugs to the market.

The use of skin cells will eventually allow doctors to create stem cells with a specific patient's genetic code, eliminating the risk that the body would reject transplanted tissues or organs.

Researchers have already shown this is possible when they cured sickle cell anemia in mice.

They used skin cells taken from the tails of sick mice, transformed them into stem cells, manipulated those stem cells into healthy bone marrow cells and then transplanted them into the sick mice.

And since the new cells came from the sick mice, there was also no need for dangerous immunosuppressant drugs to prevent rejection.

But leading stem cell researchers warned that the skin cells are not yet -- and might never be -- a substitute for embryonic stem cells.

"This new research is just the beginning -- we hardly understand how these cells work," said James Thomson of the University of Wisconsin at Madison, who led one of the two teams which made the simultaneous discoveries.

"It is not the time to abandon stem cell research," Thomson said, adding that embryonic stem cells will remain the "gold standard" by which other research is measured.

Further research is also needed to find a safer way to transform the skin cells and to make sure that the cells do not deteriorate over time.

How a Catholic priest gave us
the Big Bang Theory
Alex Higgins
www.americanchronicle.com/
December 28, 2007


The history of cosmology – the study of the Universe – for the last five hundred years is often portrayed as a clash between science on the one hand, and the cold hand of religious dogma on the other.

Part of this is rooted in fact – the Catholic Church of the Counter-Reformation for instance was suspicious of intellectual innovation and experiment, with its harsher elements longing for the certainties of the age before Martin Luther and the Protestant Reformation.

The desire to make the Universe fit into a pre-ordained and orderly scheme that needed no correction reached its infamous, idiotic height as the Dominican Order and the Inquisition persecuted Galileo for his accurate insistence that the Earth orbited the Sun.

Galileo's fate at the hands of Pope Urban VIII was not inevitable - but for various historical contingencies, the Church might have not have set its face against him. But this is far from the only episode of a reactionary Church choosing to block knowledge and progress instead of contributing towards it.

Yet the relationship between the Church and science has not always been so bad. And if we wanted an example of an alternative model of co-operation rather than antagonism, we could take as an example the most famous theory in cosmology today – the Big Bang Theory, whose surprising origins lie with a Catholic priest toiling away in a Catholic University in Belgium.

I once attended a youth club in Colchester, a town in England where I grew up as a teenager. Run by fundamentalist evangelicals (generous, kind people incidentally), who are rare in Britain, the night's activities of five-a-side football, cricket or pool would come only after some kind of Bible-reading or an unsuccessful attempt at debunking the Theory of Evolution, which was a particular bugbear of theirs.

One night, a local volunteer was explaining why the Big Bang Theory was obviously nonsense with a cutesy, homely analogy – "If you blow up a pile of bricks, you don’t get a building, it’s stupid." In your face, Stephen Hawking!

He didn’t know why scientists might have come up with the idea of the Big Bang, except perhaps as a sneaky rationalisation for undermining Christianity. He wasn’t even clear as to why he thought it posed a theological problem for Christians in the first place, though he is not alone in thinking that it does.

The irony is extraordinary - aside from being uninformed about the Theory itself, fundamentalists are usually unaware of its religious origins, and the fact that the Big Bang Theory successfully replaced a theory much less compatible with Christian ideas about the beginning of time - the Steady State Theory.

The groundwork for the Big Bang Theory was laid in the early twentieth century by the paradigm-crunching work of Edwin Hubble (as in Hubble telescope) and Albert Einstein.

Einstein’s crucial contribution was part of the fallout of his work on gravity in Switzerland around the time of the First World War. By showing that gravity was a curve in space-time caused by the distorting impact of matter, the implication was that in a Universe where everything stayed in one place, gravity would gradually draw all matter together in an almighty collision.

This meant that, contrary to the prevailing view of contemporary cosmologists, the Universe could not be static - it had to be either expanding or contracting.

Einstein didn’t much like this implication and was wedded to the notion of an unchanging Universe that had always existed. So he assumed there must be a problem with his theory, and compensated for it in his equations by inventing an artificial cosmological constant while he tried to figure out what was going on.

And on the other side of the Atlantic, from 1919 and through the 20s, Edwin Hubble was busy spending all night, night after night, making minor adjustments to the 100-inch Hooker Telescope on Mount Wilson, then the largest in the world.

By photographing some of the most distant objects in view he resolved an earlier debate and demonstrated conclusively that the Universe, far from consisting of a single galaxy – ours, the Milky Way – actually contained a huge number of galaxies, each consisting of billions of stars.

Our collective view of the Universe had to be adjusted as people realised it was a billion times larger than previously thought.

In addition to discovering these galaxies, Hubble also discovered something significant about them. Just as the pitch of a siren on an emergency vehicle changes as it drives past us - because the length of the sound waves change as they become more distant according to the Doppler effect - so too the light from distant objects can tell us whether they are moving closer or drifting away.

Together with Milton L. Humason, Hubble showed that the galaxies were moving further away from us – part of what is today called Hubble’s Law concerning the light emitted by moving galaxies. The conclusion Hubble had to draw was that the Universe was expanding, and everything in it was on the move.

But, unknown to either of them, Hubble was actually beaten to the basic idea of Hubble’s Law by a Belgian priest, Fr. Georges Lemaitre. Lemaitre trained as a Jesuit priest, served in the Belgian Army during the remorseless slaughter of World War One, and then became a student of astronomy and mathematics. He studied in Cambridge in England, then in Cambridge, Massachusetts for the Harvard Observatory and finally the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Returning to Belgium in 1925, where he worked at the Catholic University of Leuven as a part-time lecturer, his big break came two years later in 1927 when he proposed his theory of an expanding Universe to explain the movement of the galaxies, published in the Annals of the Scientific Society of Brussels.

Lemaitre was still pretty hazy about how the process of expansion could have begun. Like many scientists, he was still committed to the idea of a static Universe of unchanging size, so he proposed that it might have begun like this but then started to expand.

Since his ideas were not getting very much attention, he decided to arrange a meeting with Einstein at the Solvay Conference in Brussels in October 1927.


Fr. Lemaitre and Einstein.

Einstein, though interested, was largely dismissive, telling Lemaitre that, "Your calculations are good, but your physics is terrible". Einstein was also a little suspicious of the religious implications of these ideas. He declined to describe himself as an atheist (or a theist, or a pantheist) and liked to use the vocabulary of religion, most famously in his misguided rejection of much of quantum physics, "God does not play dice!"

But his complex and shifting view of God was of something impersonal behind fixed laws that governed the Universe, partly influenced by the 17th century philosopher Spinoza.

Einstein had previously dismissed the work of Russian mathematician, Alexander Friedman, who had proposed an expanding universe as an abstract mathematical solution to his equations in 1922. Einstein offered Lemaitre some suggestions for further investigations but left unconvinced.

Lemaitre’s old teacher, the British astronomer Arthur Eddington, was more encouraging and published a commentary on his 1927 paper in English in 1930, describing it as a brilliant solution to some of the outstanding problems astronomers faced.

In 1931, Lemaitre was invited to London by the British Association to discuss cosmology and spirituality. There he described his new solution – that the Universe had begun from a tiny and incredibly dense singularity containing all its existing matter. This he called 'the primeval atom' or a "Cosmic Egg exploding at the moment of the creation".

The Primeval Atom theory was born (or Cosmic Egg theory if you like). It wouldn’t be known as the Big Bang Theory until the British physicist, Fred Hoyle, did a radio series in 1949 in which he attempted to debunk it. He failed to change many people’s minds by then, but he did give it a better name.

Neither Eddington nor Einstein were persuaded by this idea – as Stephen Hawking, perhaps the world’s most famous living astrophysicist, has said, "few people [meaning scientists] took the idea of the beginning of the Universe seriously".

But Lemaitre was a passionate and persuasive man, and he was gaining a wider audience as he began to travel the US. He decided to surprise Hubble and Einstein by turning up to meet them both unexpectedly in 1931 and push his idea again.

This time he won them over, demonstrating how their work led to his conclusion. It was a dramatic event – Hawking has said that, "The basis of modern cosmology was established at this meeting. Looking back I can recognise this as the foundations for my own work". Einstein regarded his initial rejection of an expanding Universe as the "biggest blunder of my life".

The Big Bang did not gain easy acceptance. Like any dramatic new concept in science, it had to be tested against the evidence and alternative hypotheses.

Opponents adopted the Steady State theory of the Universe which proposed that the Universe stayed fundamentally the same over time. Since the galaxies were clearly moving apart from each other, the theory suggested that new galaxies must be constantly formed somewhere in the Universe and propelled outwards.

But Steady State theorists could not explain where many of the chemical elements we see in the Universe could have been formed, if not in the extreme conditions of the Big Bang. They also struggled to explain where the hydrogen fuel to create these elements was being formed in the Universe, and why there was so much helium in the cosmos – the leftovers of hydrogen fusion.

But the Big Bang Theory could answer that hydrogen was created in gigantic quantities in the original explosion, and the helium was part of the aftermath. The jury came back in and a new consensus was formed.

The existence of God, of course, is not settled by the truth of the Big Bang Theory, nor should religion rest its case on any scientific theory. But what can be said is that the Big Bang fits surprisingly well with the religious idea that the Universe had a distinct beginning, willed by a Creator. Betraying some bemusement, the astrophysicist Robert Jastrow put it like this:

"For the scientist… the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been there for centuries."

In reality, both the scientists and the theologians are still busy hauling themselves over the mountains of ignorance. Hopefully, they will help each other out.

Sadly, we hear little of Lemaitre today. Arguably, the way the evidence was pointing in the late 1920s, someone else might have come up with the same idea, taking up where Hubble, Friedman and Einstein left off. But the fact remains that one of the best known of all modern scientific theories was his.

In his own lifetime, his achievement was recognised. He received the Francqui Prize in Belgium, the highest honour for a scientist in the country, with Einstein and Eddington among his proposers and judges respectively. The Vatican chose him to be a member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences in 1936 (founded that year), where he worked and taught until becoming its president in 1960.

The Pontifical Academy of Sciences had its origins in an institution called the Academy of Lynxes (so-called because of the lynx’s keen eyesight), founded in 1603 under Pope Clement VIII by an Italian prince, Federico Cesi. The first president of that institution had been Galileo – an unfortunate reminder of what might have been, but for the Inquisition.

Pope John XXIII appointed Lemaitre, to his surprise, to lead the Second Vatican Council’s commission on birth control. His commission was the first ever to appoint lay people and women and to undertake a sociological investigation of the lives of Catholic families to help come to a truly fair and grounded decision.

Lemaitre died before the commission completed its report – it famously recommended acceptance of the use of birth control and contraception, a view rejected by a minority report and Pope Paul VI.

Just before Lemaitre died in 1966, he learned of the first discovery of 'cosmic background radiation' – the predicted fallout from the Big Bang, and further confirmation of his theory.

It surprises me then, that many Christians still find the idea of the Big Bang problematic. They might instead try and take the credit for it and - why not? - get on with doing some science themselves.


Some Notes on Sources

Stephen Hawking's quoted statements were made in the 1997 PBS series, 'Stephen Hawking's Universe'

Robert Jastrow's quote is cited in 'Finding Darwin's God' by the Catholic biologist Kenneth Miller which is strongly recommended to readers interested in the debate over the compatibility of religion and contemporary science.

www.findingdarwinsgod.com/

Einstein's complex views on religion, often simplified in polemics, are explored in Walter Isaacson's new biography, a summary of which he wrote here:

www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1607298,00.html

The Vatican reiterates 'No'
to environmental catastrophism


Translated from PETRUS:

VATICAN CITY, Dec 31 - The Church rejects catastrophism, and even though it does not deny the link between human behavior and global warming, it says that "scientific work must be distinguished from the ideological exploitation of it...otherwise, there is a risk of having a vision of man and nature that ultimately ends up being anti-human and anti-nature."

In an interview with the news agency FIDES, Mons. Giampaolo Crepaldi, secretary of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace this explained his own dicastery's position on the politically correct alarmism over climate change, stating also that "the Holy see will not accept any policy that limits the development of poorer nations" without correct scientific evidence.

Crepaldi pointed out:

"The Social Doctrine of the Church has never simply swallowed these radical and ideological forms of environmentalism, for two reasons. First of all, because they subordinate the needs of man to a presumed centrality of nature. And in such a perspective, everything, including man, must revolve around nature as the center around which everything must converge.

"The second reason is that certain radical forms of ecologism would block development, especially bringing into question the right of the poorer nations to develop industrially.

"Several times, the Holy Father has spoken out about the environment using two important words from Scripture: that man is called on to cultivate the earth and to take care of it. These verbs tell us that a foolish exploitation of resources is unacceptable but also that God has given the earth to man to be cultivated, in a spirit of equity and solidarity, because its resources have a universal value and validity.

"This means that development should satisfy the needs of present generations without compromising the similar satisfaction of future generations' needs.

On environmental policy, Crepaldi said "Politics should recover the ability for discernment and freedom from ideological or business conditioning, especially in the developed countries....There is is truly the risk that protection of the environment comes to be seen purely in business terms...And on the international scene, governments need more effective and efficient regulation of environmental issues, which through international organizations, will provide to all states and the international community at the same time a balanced outlook in managing environmental problems."

A dossier on the environment released by Fides criticizes the catastrophistic theses advocated by Al Gore, pointing out scientific errors in Gore's arguments that had been raised in a British court to contest the use of Gore's film on global warming as required educational material for British secondary schools. [The court ruled that the film showing must be accompanied by statements that correct the errors.]

Stem cell breakthrough
used aborted fetal cells
By Spero News
Jan. 8, 2008



A pro-life group is reporting that a recent stem cell breakthrough that turns adult skin cells to "embryonic" is not a pro-life solution as currently done.

On November 21st and 22nd, Dr. Shinya Yamanaka and Dr James Thomson published back-to-back studies that were hailed as moral alternatives to embryonic stem cell research.

Both studies involved introducing genes into adult stem cells through a lentivirus, which reprogrammed them to become "embryonic" or induced pluripotent stem (IPS) cells, without destroying human embryos. But pro-lifers may have celebrated too soon, without studying the methods used in the papers.

Just January 5 the National Institutes of Health, the U.S. government's medical research financing unit, began accepting grant applications from scientists to further the new breakthrough.

However, according to the organization Children of God for Life, both researchers used several versions of the 293 aborted fetal cell lines to modify the DNA of the host adult skin cells to accomplish the reprogramming.

"Unless you read the papers published by Dr Yamanaka in Cell and Dr Thomson in Science, you would have no idea where the DNA came from that was used to transform the adult cells", stated Debi Vinnedge, Executive Director of Children of God for Life, a pro-life watchdog organization focused on stem cell research and aborted fetal cell lines in medical products. "And even then you would have to know what you were looking for to understand it", she added.

For example, while Dr Yamanaka reports using PLAT-E, PLAT-A and 293FT cells in his paper, the proper name for these cell lines is HEK (human embryonic kidney) 293. The cells were obtained from an, electively aborted baby by Dr. Alex Van der Eb, Crucell NV, the same company producing aborted fetal cell line PER C6, derived from the retinal tissue of an 18- week gestation baby.

In the second study, Dr James Thomson of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, also used aborted fetal cell line 293FT to produce DNA used to modify adult cells. Furthermore, Dr Thomson obtained the DNA sequences he used from human ES cells. And before using foreskin fibroblasts, Thomson tested the reprogramming on IMR-90 aborted fetal cell line, taken from the lung tissue of a 16-week gestation female baby.

"Pro-lifers may be deceived by the excitement about these publications", Vinnedge cautioned. "Using aborted fetal and embryonic stem cells from deliberately destroyed human beings is certainly not any kind of moral victory."

Seton Medical Center, a Catholic hospital,is being sued for discrimination for having denied breast enhancement surgery to a transgender patient. Such a hospital would cease to be Catholic if denied the right to refuse such surgery.

Vinnedge noted that the research is fraught with other moral and clinical problems, such as fatal tumors, which are a well- documented attribute of embryonic stem cells, and which also occurred with the adult reprogrammed IPS cells.

And while Yamanaka and Thomson allege the new cells generated would be "patient specific" with no immune rejection problems, this claim is premature because there is foreign DNA present from the lentivirus used to modify the cells.

However, it is not necessary to use aborted fetal cells to produce the lentivirus at all, noted Dr Theresa Deisher, R&D Director of Ave Maria Biotechnology Company, a research firm dedicated to pro-life alternatives for unethical human therapeutics.

"There are other ethical ways to produce the DNA needed for transformation, efficiently and morally," said Dr Deisher. "If these means were employed to produce the needed DNA, there would be no moral issues with the use of reprogrammed adult cells for research."

=====================================================================

I have to search for any other reports about this, and possible responses from the scientists accused. Also, the article does not give the scientific credentials of Vinnedge who is making the charges.

A Catholic theologian on God and science
By Frank Wilson, Books Editor
Philadelphia Inquirer
Jan. 13, 2008


This book review is notable because it places Cardinal Schoenborn's book in the right context within the current public debate about faith and religion as well as on evolution as science and evolution as ideology.


Chance or Purpose
Creation, Evolution,
and a Rational Faith
By Christoph Schönborn
Ignatius. 181 pp. $19.95



During the year just past, much attention was paid to a spate of atheist tracts, notably Sam Harris's Letter to a Christian Nation, Christopher Hitchens's God Is Not Great, and Richard Dawkins's The God Delusion.

Less attention was paid to a spate of books by scientists who happen also to be believers - biologist Joan Roughgarden's Evolution and Christian Faith, astronomer Owen Gingerich's God's Universe, and geneticist Francis Collins's The Language of God.

Though the media buzz has tended to focus on the science-vs-religion angle, it is worth noting that only four of the aforementioned books are by scientists and three of those argue against such a conflict.

That said, it is also worth noting that none of the books is by a theologian, and Dawkins' book suffers - as does Hitchens's - not only from a relentlessly hectoring tone, but also from a tenuous understanding of both philosophy and theology. (In fairness, Dawkins seems to have read the Bible pretty thoroughly and is openly appreciative of the Authorized Version's glorious language and literary significance.)

Christoph Schönborn's Chance or Purpose offers a look from the theologian's side. Schönborn, the cardinal archbishop of Vienna, studied theology under Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI. Together, they edited the Catechism of the Catholic Church.

Schönborn's new book may be said to have evolved out of an article of his that appeared in the New York Times in July 2005 headlined "Finding God in Nature," in which the cardinal seemed to place Catholic doctrine uncomfortably in alignment with intelligent design theory.

In his book, however, he goes out of his way repeatedly to differentiate between evolution as the best scientific explanation we have of how species come about and evolution as an ideology maintaining that natural selection has rendered all religious faith untenable.

In doing so, he says a number of quite interesting things, among them this: ". . . nowadays, whenever people talk about 'design' and a 'designer,' they automatically think of a 'divine engineer,' a kind of omniscient technician. . . . Here, in my view, lies the most profound cause of many misunderstandings - even on the part of the 'intelligent design' school in the U.S.A. God is no clockmaker; he is not a constructor of machines, but a Creator of natures."

Schönborn does not regard "the methodical exclusion of divine involvement" - sometimes called "methodological atheism" - as amounting necessarily to a denial of God's existence. It is, rather, "a straightforward method of science [which] cannot assume the existence of a 'clockmaker' who intervenes. [It] is looking for mechanisms and sets of conditions that can explain the way things happen."

What the theologian's perspective contributes most to this debate is that the term God, as theologians understand it, simply cannot be an object of scientific inquiry: God "is not just one cause among others. . . . He does not shape something that already exists. . . . [His] act of creation is not in time. . . ."

Science studies nature, and God is not a part of nature.

What is perhaps most interesting is the extent to which Schönborn is sympathetic to the views of the controversial Jesuit paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, whose 1960 book The Phenomenon of Man (boasting a foreword by no less an evolutionist than Julian Huxley) gave a Christological spin to evolutionary theory (Christ "becomes the visible center of evolution as well as its goal, the 'omega-point'").

Linking evolution to Christ may sound bizarre, but it is central to the point of Schönborn's book, evident in its title. Need evolution be thought of as a matter of pure chance? Or might it be purposeful?

There is much to be said for Teilhard's attempt to harmonize faith and science. The prologue to the Fourth Gospel refers to Christ as the Logos. Schönborn points out that the Greek word logos, while it does mean "word," can also mean "essential determining factor." In this respect, it has much in common with the Chinese word Tao; in fact, the Chinese translation of the Fourth Gospel begins with the phrase, "In the beginning was the Tao. . . ."

The idea that a living principle of intelligence and personality inheres in being itself and is essentially connected to a supernatural intelligence and personality that transcends being is fundamentally what authentic religion is about.

Institutions and doctrines and even revered texts, to say nothing of flawed human beings, may obscure and confound that insight - and indeed often have, and with grave consequences - but it is no less profound and worth upholding for that.

"It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God," the Psalmist tells us. "But," as D.H. Lawrence noted, "it is an even more fearful thing to fall out of them."

Vatican condemns
cloned human embryo research
By Phil Stewart




VATICAN CITY, Jan. 18 (Reuters) - The Vatican on Friday condemned the cloning of human embryos, calling it the "worst type of exploitation of the human being."

"This ranks among the most morally illicit acts, ethically speaking," said Monsignor Elio Sgreccia, president of the Pontifical Academy for Life, the Vatican department that helps oversee the Church's position on bioethics issues,.

A U.S. company said on Thursday it used cloning technology to make five human embryos, with the eventual hope of making matched stem cells for patients.

If verified, the team at Stemagen Corp., would be the first to prove they have cloned human beings as a source of stem cells, the master cells of the body -- which scientists hope to harness to repair devastating injuries and cure diseases.

Sgreccia said the cloning research was unjustifiable. He also said it was unnecessary, given advances in similar research that bypasses the controversial use of embryos.

"There isn't even -- I won't say the justification, because it's never justified -- but not even the pretext of finding something (new)," he told Vatican radio.

There are several types of stem cells. Embryonic stem cells, made from days-old embryos, are considered the most powerful because they can give rise to all the cell types in the body.

Other teams have made stem cells they believe are similar to embryonic cells using a variety of techniques, including reprogramming ordinary skin cells into what are called induced pluripotent stem cells.

Sgreccia said, given the alternatives, he could not understand why scientists wanted to use human embryos -- which the Roman Catholic Church believes should be protected.

"You can't know any more if this is all a game ... done solely out of the desire to experiment on men and women," he said.

Stemagen Corp said it used a technique called somatic cell nuclear transfer, or SCNT, which involves hollowing out an egg cell and injecting the nucleus of a cell from the donor to be copied -- in this case, the skin cells from two men.

It is the same technique used to make Dolly the sheep in 1996, the first mammal to be cloned from an adult.

Vatican condemns
cloned human embryo research
By Phil Stewart




VATICAN CITY, Jan. 18 (Reuters) - The Vatican on Friday condemned the cloning of human embryos, calling it the "worst type of exploitation of the human being."

"This ranks among the most morally illicit acts, ethically speaking," said Monsignor Elio Sgreccia, president of the Pontifical Academy for Life, the Vatican department that helps oversee the Church's position on bioethics issues,.

A U.S. company said on Thursday it used cloning technology to make five human embryos, with the eventual hope of making matched stem cells for patients.

If verified, the team at Stemagen Corp., would be the first to prove they have cloned human beings as a source of stem cells, the master cells of the body -- which scientists hope to harness to repair devastating injuries and cure diseases.

Sgreccia said the cloning research was unjustifiable. He also said it was unnecessary, given advances in similar research that bypasses the controversial use of embryos.

"There isn't even -- I won't say the justification, because it's never justified -- but not even the pretext of finding something (new)," he told Vatican radio.

There are several types of stem cells. Embryonic stem cells, made from days-old embryos, are considered the most powerful because they can give rise to all the cell types in the body.

Other teams have made stem cells they believe are similar to embryonic cells using a variety of techniques, including reprogramming ordinary skin cells into what are called induced pluripotent stem cells.

Sgreccia said, given the alternatives, he could not understand why scientists wanted to use human embryos -- which the Roman Catholic Church believes should be protected.

"You can't know any more if this is all a game ... done solely out of the desire to experiment on men and women," he said.

Stemagen Corp said it used a technique called somatic cell nuclear transfer, or SCNT, which involves hollowing out an egg cell and injecting the nucleus of a cell from the donor to be copied -- in this case, the skin cells from two men.

It is the same technique used to make Dolly the sheep in 1996, the first mammal to be cloned from an adult.

Pope says science should serve humanity
rather than the other way round
By staff writers
www.ekklesia.co.uk/news/world
30 Jan 2008

This meeting was reported earlier as general news in NEWS ABOUT BENEDICT, but this report is much more focused. The entire address deserves to be read in full - see HOMILIES, DISCOURSES, MESSAGES.


Pope Benedict XVI has told a gathering of academics that science should serve rather than enslave humanity, warning that the reduction of human beings and nature to mere 'objects' is not good for the spirit of reasoned enquiry.

The comments came on Monday 28 January 2008 at a meeting of professors from different disciplines sponsored jointly by the Paris Academy of Sciences and Pontifical Academy of Sciences.

The Pope spoke of the "seductive" powers of a certain ideology of science that can relegate the moral and spiritual quest. "It's more important than ever to educate our contemporaries' consciences so that science does not become the criteria for goodness," he told the audience.

Scientific investigation should be accompanied by "research into anthropology, philosophy and theology" to give insight into "[humanity]'s own mystery, because no science can say who [we are]s, where [we] come from or where [we are] going", Benedict declared.

A human being is not "a bundle of convergences, determinisms or physical and chemical reactions," the Pope added, and should not be treated as such.

He repeated his plea, made in a number of speeches since he was elected in 2005, for humankind to be "respected as the centre of creation" and not relegated by more short-term interests.

The speech was described as "thoughtful" by a number of the participants in the conference, non-religious as well as religious. It echoed the concerns of humanists as well as faith leaders for a consonance between scientific rationality and personalist philosophy.

However the newsbrief of the National Secular Society in the UK immediately dismissed the speech as "anti-science stupidity".

The German-born Pope's conservative public stance on issues such as abortion and embryonic stem-cell research has also lead critics to accuse him of holding views driven by a narrow rather than a broad religious ideology.

Benedict was recently involved in a row with some students and teachers at a well-established Rome university, when the question as to whether he had sufficiently acknowledged the past wrong-doing of the Church in condemning Galileo came into the spotlight.

Three-parent embryo formed in lab
BBC News
Feb. 5, 2008

The Italian media had ample commentary on this news today. I will translate when I can.

Scientists believe they have made a potential breakthrough in the treatment of serious disease by creating a human embryo with three separate parents.

The Newcastle University team believe the technique could help to eradicate a whole class of hereditary diseases, including some forms of epilepsy.

The embryos have been created using DNA from a man and two women in lab tests. It could ensure women with genetic defects do not pass the diseases on to their children.

The technique is intended to help women with diseases of the mitochondria - mini-organelles that are found within individual cells.

They are sometimes described as "cellular power plants" because they generate most of the cell's energy.

Faults in the mitochondrial DNA can cause around 50 known diseases, some of which lead to disability and death.

About one in every 6,500 people is affected by such conditions, which include fatal liver failure, stroke-like episodes, blindness, muscular dystrophy, diabetes and deafness.

At present, no treatment for mitochondrial diseases exists.

The Newcastle team have effectively given the embryos a mitochondrial transplant.

They experimented on 10 severely abnormal embryos left over from traditional fertility treatment.

Within hours of their creation, the nucleus, containing DNA from the mother and father, was removed from the embryo, and implanted into a donor egg whose DNA had been largely removed.

The only genetic information remaining from the donor egg was the tiny bit that controls production of mitochondria - around 16,000 of the 3billion component parts that make up the human genome.

The embryos then began to develop normally, but were destroyed within six days.

Experiments using mice have shown that the offspring with the new mitochondria carry no information that defines any human attributes.

So while any baby born through this method would have genetic elements from three people, the nuclear DNA that influences appearance and other characteristics would not come from the woman providing the donor egg.

However, the team only have permission to carry out the lab experiments and as yet this would not be allowed to be offered as a treatment.

Professor Patrick Chinnery, a member of the Newcastle team, said: "We believe that from this work, and work we have done on other animals that in principle we could develop this technique and offer treatment in the forseeable future that will give families some hope of avoiding passing these diseases to their children."

Dr Marita Pohlschmidt, of the Muscular Dystrophy Campaign, which has funded the Newcastle research, was confident it would lead to a badly needed breakthrough in treatment.

"Mitochondrial myopathies are a group of complex and severe diseases," she said.

"This can make it very difficult for clinicians to provide genetic counselling and give patients an accurate prognosis."

However, but the Newcastle work has attracted opposition.

Josephine Quintavalle, of the pro-life group Comment on Reproductive Ethics, said it was "risky, dangerous" and a step towards "designer babies".

"It is human beings they are experimenting with," she said.

"We should not be messing around with the building blocks of life."

Mrs Quintavalle said embryo research in the US using DNA from one man and two women was discontinued because of the "huge abnormalities" in some cases.

Dr David King, of Human Genetics Alert, expressed concern about a "drift towards GM babies".

=====================================================================


Similar trials of mitochondrial transplants from donor eggs have been done in the United States in the past 10 years, but no live birth resulting from such a manipulation has yet been reported.

In medicine, a procedure will not become 'standard of care' - i.e., routine as opposed to experimental - until enough successes with appropriate statistical power (a great enough sampling to validate drawing general conclusions) have been reported. In reproductive medicine, only a live birth is considered a 'success'; and in reproductive manipulations with a stated end - as for sex selection, pre-implantation genetic diagnosis, or therapy as in this case - it must be a live birth that accomplishes the desired purpose.

Leading neonatal physician is convinced
babies feel pain at 20 weeks in the womb
by Steven Ertelt
February 12, 2008


Washington, DC (LifeNews.com) -- A leading physician who has investigated the pain premature infants feel says he's convinced that unborn children have the capacity to feel pain as early as 20 weeks into pregnancy.

Dr. Kanwaljeet Anand, a University of Arkansas professor, is the foremost authority on the subject. He recently spoke with the New York Times about his research.

Anand says it started at John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford, England, when he was a resident at a neonatal intensive care unit.

He noticed babies would come back from surgeries in terrible condition and realized it was because they were suffering through the operations without anesthesia.

Clinical trials eventually showed that babies suffered massive stress without it and babies who received anesthesia beforehand were 15 percent more likely to survive such early operations. Today, the standard of care that Anand discovered is routine.

As technology advanced, so did the ability to determine when babies began to have the capacity to feel pain.

“So I said to myself, Could it be that this pain system is developed and functional before the baby is born?” he told the New York Times.

He eventually determined that pain begins at least halfway through pregnancy at 20 weeks -- a time when abortions are still done in the United States and many other nations where it's legal.

Tony Perkins, the head of the Family Research Council, said he appreciated the New York Times's willingness to profile Anand and fetal pain.

He told LifeNews.com the pain babies feel during an abortion is a "meaningful argument for persuading women to reconsider their abortions."

"The mere fact that the Times acknowledged that fetal pain occurs is a significant step forward," he said, and added that the report treated the topic "with the impartiality and dignity it warrants."

"Americans deserve to know the truth about the humanity of the unborn child," he concluded.


UCLA researchers confirm
new stem cell breakthrough


Los Angeles, Feb 14, 2008 (CNA).- U.S. scientists have reprogrammed human skin cells into cells with characteristics similar to those of embryonic stem cells, confirming the breakthrough discovery made by a Japanese researcher, according to news reports.

Stem cells are considered to have significant potential for medical treatments including tissue regrowth and transplants. While some stem cells can be extracted from adult tissue, others are produced through the controversial process of cloning human embryos and destroying them to harvest their cells. Embryonic stem cells have the ability to become every cell type found in the human body.

Scientists at the University of California at Los Angeles genetically altered human skin cells using four regulator genes, publishing their findings in the February 11 edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of the Sciences.

Their process produced what are called induced pluripotent cells, or IPS cells, that are almost identical to human embryonic stem cells in function and biological structure.

The lead author of the study was Kathrin Plath, an assistant professor of biological chemistry and a researcher with the Eli and Edythe Broad Center of Regenerative Medicine and Stem Cell Research. She described the research in a prepared statement.

"Our reprogrammed human skin cells were virtually indistinguishable from human embryonic stem cells," she said. "Our findings are an important step towards manipulating differentiated human cells to generate an unlimited supply of patient specific pluripotent stem cells. We are very excited about the potential implications."

The UCLA research confirms the similar work of researchers Shinya Yamanaka at Kyoto University and James Thomson at the University of Wisconsin. Plath said the studies demonstrate human IPS cells can be easily created by different laboratories and could mark a milestone in stem cell-based regenerative medicine.

The new technique could replace a stem cell harvesting method called somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT), sometimes called therapeutic cloning. At present, therapeutic cloning has not been successful in humans.

The first study author William Lowry, assistant professor of molecular, cell, and developmental biology, also addressed the findings in a statement.

"Reprogramming normal human cells into cells with identical properties to those in embryonic stem cells without SCNT may have important therapeutic ramifications and provide us with another valuable method to develop human stem cell lines," he said.

Like other prominent stem cell researchers, Lowry claimed that embryonic stem cell research was still necessary.

"It is important to remember that our research does not eliminate the need for embryo-based human embryonic stem cell research, but rather provides another avenue of worthwhile investigation," he said.

Breast milk contains stem cells
By Catherine Madden



Mammary stem cells (red/blue) and adult cells (green) isolated from human breast milk.]


PERTH, Australia, Feb. 11 - The Perth scientist who made the world-first discovery that human breast milk contains stem cells is confident that within five years scientists will be harvesting them to research treatment for conditions as far-reaching as spinal injuries, diabetes and Parkinson’s disease.

But what Dr Mark Cregan is excited about right now is the promise that his discovery could be the start of many more exciting revelations about the potency of breast milk.

He believes that it not only meets all the nutritional needs of a growing infant but contains key markers that guide his or her development into adulthood.

“We already know how breast milk provides for the baby’s nutritional needs, but we are only just beginning to understand that it probably performs many other functions,” says Dr Cregan, a molecular biologist at The University of Western Australia.

He says that, in essence, a new mother’s mammary glands take over from the placenta to provide the development guidance to ensure a baby’s genetic destiny is fulfilled.

“It is setting the baby up for the perfect development,” he says. “We already know that babies who are breast fed have an IQ advantage and that there’s a raft of other health benefits. Researchers also believe that the protective effects of being breast fed continue well into adult life.

“The point is that many mothers see milks as identical – formula milk and breast milk look the same so they must be the same. But we know now that they are quite different and a lot of the effects of breast milk versus formula don’t become apparent for decades. Formula companies have focussed on matching breast milk’s nutritional qualities but formula can never provide the developmental guidance.”

It was Dr Cregan’s interest in infant health that led him to investigate the complex cellular components of human milk. “I was looking at this vast complexity of cells and I thought, ‘No one knows anything about them’.”

His hunch was that if breast milk contains all these cells, surely it has their precursors, too?

His team cultured cells from human breast milk and found a population that tested positive for the stem cell marker, nestin. Further analysis showed that a side population of the stem cells were of multiple lineages with the potential to differentiate into multiple cell types. This means the cells could potentially be “reprogrammed” to form many types of human tissue.

He presented his research at the end of January to 200 of the world’s leading experts in the field at the International Conference of the Society for Research on Human Milk and Lactation in Perth.

“We have shown these cells have all the physical characteristics of stem cells. What we will do next is to see if they behave like stem cells,” he says.

If so, they promise to provide researchers with an entirely ethical means of harvesting stem cells for research without the debate that has dogged the harvesting of cells from embryos.

Further research on immune cells, which have also been found in breast milk and have already been shown to survive the baby’s digestive process, could provide a pathway to developing targets to beat certain viruses or bacteria.

Worshiping at Darwin's altar
by JOHN WEST
Waco Tribune (Texas)
February 18, 2008

A new push is being made to inject religion into the nation’s science classrooms.

But it’s not coming from those you might think.

After years of accusing Darwin’s critics of trying to insert religion into biology classes on the sly, leading defenders of evolution are now campaigning to incorporate religion explicitly into classroom lessons on evolution.

Eugenie Scott, head of the pro-evolution National Center for Science Education, recommends having biology students read statements endorsing evolution by theologians.

Science teachers around the nation are already using Kenneth Miller’s Finding Darwin’s God: A Scientist’s Search for Common Ground Between God and Evolution to convince students that evolution and religious faith are compatible.

An educational Web site called “Understanding Evolution,” meanwhile, encourages teachers to debunk the “misconception” among students that evolution is incompatible with religion. Funded by more than a half million in tax dollars from the National Science Foundation, the Web site directs teachers to dozens of statements endorsing evolution by various religious groups, including a declaration that “modern evolutionary theory . . . is in no way at odds with our belief in a Creator God, or in the revelation and presence of that God in Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit.”

While there are good secular reasons for teaching students about the science of evolution, taxpayers might wonder what business it is of the government to persuade their children that evolution comports with “the revelation and presence of . . . God in Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit.”

The new efforts to use religion to promote evolution in the schools don’t even come close to following Supreme Court precedents on the establishment clause of the First Amendment. Imagine the outcry that would ensue if the critics of Darwin’s theory proposed using religion to denounce evolution in biology classes. How long would it take before the ACLU was on the scene?

Yet support for the use of religion to promote evolution in schools seems to be spreading.

Last fall, in conjunction with a highly touted “docudrama” attacking intelligent design, PBS distributed a briefing packet to educators across the country that made a point of including statements endorsing evolution by Jewish and Christian groups.

In January, the National Academy of Sciences issued a report on evolution for teachers, school board members and others that similarly spent several pages trying to convince readers that good religion supports evolution.

Public schools certainly are allowed to hold objective discussions of competing religious explanations in relevant courses. But that is not what the defenders of evolution are advocating. They are pushing one-sided religious propaganda with the intent of changing students’ spiritual beliefs.

Apparently, religious indoctrination in science classes is okay so long as religion is used to endorse Darwin’s theory.

The hypocrisy of the situation is blatant, but then again, so is the cynicism.

Evolution defenders frequently complain that Darwin’s theory is under attack from people of faith, and perhaps they feel religious instruction is a way to defuse that threat. If so, they are tone-deaf.

If they think some religious people are offended by evolution now, just wait until more teachers start proselytizing for Darwinian theology in the classroom.

John G. West, Ph.D. is a senior fellow at the Seattle-based Discovery Institute.