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Wednesday,
February 1, 2006
Diabetics, you may want to think about this
Allow me to hearken back to a particularly dorky line from the SotU address:
"Tonight I ask you to pass legislation to prohibit the most egregious abuses of medical research: human cloning in all its forms, creating or implanting embryos for experiments, creating human-animal hybrids, and buying, selling, or patenting human embryos."
Initially, it made me wonder if Dubya had been watching those really bad B-movies on the Sci Fi channel lately. Just in case anyone's confused about this, however, allow me to quote Charles Stross:
"Y'see, human-animal hybrids make most people think of "The Island of Dr Moreau", ape-men and leopard-men and stock phrases recycled by Devo. But in reality, human-animal hybrids have been around for well over a decade in one form or another, and indeed there's a strong case for arguing that they form the backbone of modern medical research. Human-animal hybrids mean things like pigs that express human immune-system signalling proteins (goodbye, cheap xenotransplant organs with no histocompatability issues). Mice with human-derived prion diseases (goodbye, research model for Alhzeimer's and CJD). At the extreme interpretation of the law (and you know how goddamn extreme the American criminal judicial prosecution system can get) you can say goodbye to human insulin (an e. coli that contains the gene for human insulin is, of course, an animal-human hybrid). Just pick up the last year of Scientific American and go through it with a red marker pen while muttering "human-animal hybrid" to yourself, and at the end you'll discover that you've put a red line through half of the most promising medical research strategies in general, and about 90% of the strategies for tackling the most serious degenerative diseases we suffer from.
Doubtless [Bush] thought he was protecting the dignity of human life. In reality, though, he's just sentenced hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of his fellow Americans to suffer slow, lingering, horrific, and avoidable, premature deaths."
The only heartening thing is that Dubya needs to get congressional support to pass this sort of bill, and I'm hoping against hope that SOME of our elected officials realize what this really means and will block it. A phone call or email to your senator reminding them of this might not be a bad thing, either.