The Choice Not Taken

.
Maybe it comes of having someone near and dear to me living with chronic leukemia and never being quite certain what the next week, the next month, the next year may hold...

Three disparate news items have caught my eye lately. This article from the Minnesota Independent about the University of Minnesota's ground-breaking research trials using embryonic stem cells. The success rate against cancer tumors? 100%. Admittedly a small study. All the more reason to push for more, soonest. Because a comparable trial using umbilical cord cells produced only 38%.

Don't know about you, but 100% odds sound a lot more appealing for my loved one than 38%.

And then, over dinner, we listened to Richard Haass on Hardball, author of War of Necessity, War of Choice, A Memoir of Two Wars in Iraq. Distilling Haass, Dubya mis-led us into war in Iraq without ever hearing any contrary discussions, only that which supported his agenda. And that agenda could be summed up thusly: Afghanistan wasn't grand enough, we didn't put on a big enough show, we didn't get Osama bin Laden, so we shifted ground and went for the ol' Shock and Awe.

Bushie needed to prove...what, exactly? That he was a real man because he could deciderate to cause enough carnage and damage and destruction that the whole world—well, the whole Middle Eastern world—would bow down and shower us in rose petals and candy and dancing children and.... ?

There is something so consummately monstrous in the whole mindset that led us into Iraq that it's almost beyond comprehension. The arrested adolescent President who took on the trappings of a demi-god.

How Napoleonic. Complete with the costume..."mission accomplished."

What mission, though?

And at what price?

Just imagine, if George W. Bush, who had the moment, had cast himself on the side of the angels, pushed for embryonic stem cell research, for example. Instead of joining the demons in a lust for empire and dictatorial power and the torture tactics that sank him and his ilk to the same level as those he professed to...hmmmmm.... I don't have a problem with dictatorships, as long as I get to be dictator. Don't ever say he didn't warn us.

Maybe, if the man of the "gentlemanly C" (methinks the "gentleman" doth profess too much, that's grade inflation if I've ever seen it) had focused on building a better world instead of his destructive path, then we wouldn't have circumstances like those that took Andy Rounds.

Or at least we'd be closer to a cure.
.
crossposted at firedoglake's Oxdown Gazette

Second Wind

.
News that Barack Obama intends to reverse Dubya's ban on stem cell research as one of his first orders of business is welcome indeed.

And if you need a reason why...if you or one of your loved ones isn't one of the people who just might benefit from this vital research...then consider this: in Europe, stem cell surgery has given a new lease on life to a woman who needed a new windpipe. And without the risks of rejection and infection that too often have been the traditional dangers of such surgery.

We're getting our economic as well as medical butts kicked.

Just think, if the self-anointed moralists who posture and pontificate—and let's be blunt, profit—from screeding in the name of "pro-life" really took the time to think about what their obstruction and distortion/spin and irrational exuberance to protest and prevent such medical advancements means to the, you know, living...

Maybe then the "pro-life" movement would get a second wind.

Because striving to responsibly use the brains we are blessed with for to good of all, rather than as a way to connive and divide and abandon the living who need medical and scientific advancements, now that's a pro-life movement we could all get behind.
.

Prairie's Reading: The life you save....

.
Darksyde over at DailyKos has a post this morning well worth setting aside your morning blogreading or cereal-box reading for.

Regenerative medicine is a subject that's caught the attention of the Sunshine family because we know the challenges of living with a removed limb. And the prospect that some day that could be restored is one that we hope for, for others down the road. Because like most science, cures and treatments take years to develop.

So when roadblocks are put in the way of that development, it behooves us all to take a look at why.

The Bush Administration's War on Science and Medicine has examples that are legion. Changing scientific documents prepared by their own departments. Muzzling scientists from speaking out. Cutting funding.

And ultimately that's a war on each of us...because, as DarkSyde notes, the diseases and events which make regenerative medicine a necessary science are waiting for us all.
.