Mary Meets Dolly

This week atheist writer, Richard Dawkins, tweeted that parents should abort their babies with Downs and "try again." He said it was "immoral" for parents not to kill their baby if he or she had an extra 21st chromosome. (Notice how quickly a "choice" becomes an "obligation" in the Culture of Death.)

After reading his comments, I wanted to write a post that was composed of just one sentence:

Richard Dawkins is an ignorant bigot.

The Reillys represent some of the experiences reported in three surveys conducted by doctors at Children’s Hospital in Boston that suggest the reality of Down syndrome is positive for a vast majority of parents, siblings and people with Down syndrome themselves.

Among 2,044 parents or guardians surveyed, 79 percent reported their outlook on life was more positive because of their child with Down syndrome....

Skotko also found that among siblings ages 12 and older, 97 percent expressed feelings of pride about their brother or sister with Down syndrome and 88 percent were convinced they were better people because of their sibling with Down syndrome. A third study evaluating how adults with Down syndrome felt about themselves reports 99 percent responded they were happy with their lives, 97 percent liked who they are, and 96 percent liked how they looked.

You have no doubt seen a video of a friend on Facebook being doused with buckets of ice water. What would possess a human being to do something so chilling? It is the Ice Bucket Challenge to raise money and awareness for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), often called Lou Gehrig's Disease. ALS is a devastating, progressive neurodegenerative disease that is fatal and has no cure.

Here is how Ice Bucket Challenge works. People video themselves getting doused with ice water then share that video on social media. They challenge others to do the same in the next 24 hours. If anyone rejects the challenge they are encouraged to give $100 to an ALS charity.

Bringing money and awareness to ALS is a noble goal indeed. The Ice Bucket Challenge seems like a silly stunt, but it is working. It has gone viral, and money is pouring in to ALS charities. Celebrities, politicians, and everyday people are getting cold and wet to help those with this devastating disease

The ALS Association, the "preeminent ALS organization", reports that they have taken in over $4 million this year; four times what was donated last year.

But not all ALS charities are the same. For example the ALS Association reported that that last year they gave $500,000 to Northeast ALS Consortium (NEALS), the largest association of ALS clinical researchers in the world. Likely, the ALS Association will give more to NEALS this year with the popularity of the Ice Bucket Challenge.

NEALS helps run clinical trials for ALS. On their website, they say that a "NEALS-affliated" trial is one where the "sponsor of the trial has contracted NEALS Coordinating Centers to help conduct the trial. A sponsor may contract NEALS to manage an entire trial or just a portion of the work."

I found a NEALS-affliated active trial on their website that clearly states it uses stem cells that originated from an electively aborted fetus. The trial is being funded by NeuralStem Inc. and the description states:

These stem cells have been engineered from the spinal cord of a single fetus electively aborted after eight weeks of gestation. The tissue was obtained with the mother's consent.

Of course the fetus, from whom the "tissue" was taken, did not "give consent."

So if you give to the ALS Association your money may end up supporting clinical trials that use aborted fetal cells. Even if the money is not directly going to facilitate such research, it will be going to organizations that see no problem in using aborted innocents as biological material for medical use. That legitimizes and encourages the practice which is unacceptable in my estimation.

So who can you give your Ice Bucket Challenge money to? I know of one charity that is not focused on funding the research, but on making the lives of those with ALS better through technology and on raising awareness for the disease. Team Gleason, founded by former NFL player and ALS patient, Steve Gleason, has the following mission:

• Help provide individuals with neuromuscular diseases or injuries with leading edge technology, equipment and services.
• Create a global conversation about ALS to ultimately find solutions and an end to the disease.
• Raise public awareness toward ALS by providing and documenting extraordinary life adventures for individuals with muscular diseases or injuries.

(Kyodo News / Associated Press)

The world is reeling from the apparent suicide of Robin Williams. As someone who has suffered with debilitating depression, I could probably add quite a bit to the already expansive commentary. All I will say is that if you feel, on a regular basis, that your family and the world would be better off without you, that is your depression LYING to you. Even though you may think that it is, your perception is not reality. Please seek help right away. And if you are already under the care of a medical professional, please tell them that you need to try something else. There is hope. You can crawl out from the crushing weight of the pain and sadness.

Robin Williams is not the only "celebrity" suicide that has happened recently. Earlier this month, Yoshiki Sasai, a Japanese researcher involved with the STAP (stimulus-triggered acquisition of pluripotency) research hanged himself at his research lab, the RIKEN Center for Developmental Biology.

You may remember the STAP breakthrough from earlier this year. Nature published two papers that claimed that pluripotent stem cells could be made simply by placing cells in an acid bath. The stem cell research world went crazy. There seemed to be endless stories about the Japanese scientists who pulled off this amazing feat. They were instant celebrities.

Then, it was found the papers had errors. Results could not be duplicated. The Los Angeles Times has more:

At first, scientists hailed the creation of the so-called stimulus-triggered acquisition of pluripotency, or STAP, stem cells. But within days, serious questions arose about the researchers’ methods, leading to a RIKEN investigation that found several instances of scientific misconduct on that part of study leader Haruko Obokata, a rising scientist at RIKEN.

Both studies were retracted in July.

Sasai was Obokata’s supervisor and was supposed to oversee her writing, Japan Times reported. RIKEN faulted Sasai for failing to check the data used in the study and for providing weak oversight that allowed Obokata to submit a manuscript with manipulated images and other serious problems.

Science, in the form of nameless scientists, is already considered infallible by many in our society.  Adding fame and a rock star image to the mix, I find scary and tasteless. Scientists are people too. They are subject to the same pressures, desires and weaknesses as the rest of us. Do we really want scientists to be rock stars with "sex, drugs and rock and roll" as the mantra?  I don't. I want them to be geeked-out and holed up in their labs doing whatever their grant money is for.

**Now before anyone goes and reports that this a real cookbook, this is fiction people, fiction.** This author is either a visionary or he is totally crazy. The mention of self-cannibalism makes me lean toward crazy. From Dominic Skelton at the Times Live:

A year after the presentation of the world’s first lab-grown hamburger a strange conceptual cookbook for stem cell food has arrived on the scene.

Koert van Mensvoort, an artist and philosopher from Amsterdam is behind the In Vitro Meat Cookbook. With help from the Next Nature Foundation he decided to explore the prospects of lab-grown meat and thought about the kinds of dishes we could expect in the future.

His book contains 45 conceptually uncookable recipes, according to Vice. The book includes recipes for in vitro oysters, dodo nuggets, knitted meat and see-through sashimi. Van Mensvoort also said that you should be able to eat a sausage from a pig that is still alive. He said in an interview that way you could “hug and meet it.”

One of the more outlandish dishes involves a device that extracts a person’s DNA so that someone could effectively eat him or herself.

The In Vitro Meat Cookbook, which describes itself as half fiction and half science inquiry, will be launched on 5 August.

I will not call a male “she”; thirty-two years of suffering in this androcentric society, and of surviving, have earned me the title “woman”; one walk down the street by a male transvestite, five minutes of his being hassled (which he may enjoy), and then he dares, he dares to think he understands our pain? No, in our mothers’ names and in our own, we must not call him sister.

Warning! Spoilers Ahead!!

Divergent is the latest of the teen dystopian future trilogies to hit the big screen. I have read all three books, Divergent, Insurgent, and Allegiant. Is it not my favorite trilogy in this growing genre, but I know that teens everywhere love it.

I do appreciate that Veronica Roth has tackled some of the most difficult issues that will face the younger generation. The third book, Allegiant, takes human genetic engineering and genetic discrimination head on.

Here is a little background. The trilogy begins in a walled city where everyone lives in 5 factions depending on their personal qualities. The Amity are all about peace and friendship. The Candor are brutally honest. The Erudite are incredibly clever. The Dauntless are risk-takers devoid of fear. And the Abnegation are selfless and driven to serve others.

If a person does not fit in one of these boxes, they are called "divergent,", and being divergent is a dangerous prospect. The main character, Tris, is divergent. She spends the first novel trying to hide it and the second novel discovering she needs to get outside the city to see what lies beyond the walls.

In the third book, we learn why the city is set up the way it is. On the outside, Tris finds out the city is a genetic experiment to try and fix damage that was done generations ago. With typical arrogance and ignorance, human beings began to genetically alter themselves to be better. The genetic engineering was done in a germ-line fashion and had unforeseen side effects that generations later were still wreaking havoc. One character involved in running the experiment explains:

“But when the genetic manipulations began to take effect, the alterations had disastrous consequences. As it turns out, the attempt had resulted not in corrected genes, but in damaged ones,” David says. “Take away someone’s fear, or low intelligence, or dishonesty . . . and you take away their compassion. Take away someone’s aggression and you take away their motivation, or their ability to assert themselves. Take away their selfishness and you take away their sense of self-preservation. If you think about it, I’m sure you know exactly what I mean.”

I tick off each quality in my mind as he says it—fear, low intelligence, dishonesty, aggression, selfishness. He is talking about the factions. And he’s right to say that every faction loses something when it gains a virtue: the Dauntless, brave but cruel; the Erudite, intelligent but vain; the Amity, peaceful but passive; the Candor, honest but inconsiderate; the Abnegation, selfless but stifling.

Our mission is to protect clean athletes by preserving the integrity of competition not only for today’s athletes but also the athletes of tomorrow. We have heard from many athletes who have faced an unfair dilemma — dope, or don’t compete at the highest levels of the sport. Many of them abandoned their dreams and left sport because they refused to endanger their health and participate in doping. That is a tragic choice no athlete should have to make.

Although this review is focused on the science, it is an ethical concern to carry out experiments on animals, especially non-human primates, if these are likely to not be informative.

"Until a healthy baby is born, we cannot say 100 percent that these techniques are safe," said Dr. Andy Greenfield, who chaired the expert panel behind the report.

The panel strongly recommends that permission is sought from the parents of the children born from MST or PNT to be followed up for an extensive period... any female born following MST or PNT should be advised, when old enough, that she may herself be at risk of having a child with a significant level of mutant mtDNA, putting her child, and if female, subsequent generations at risk of mitochondrial disease.

Scientists have used cloning technology to make stem cells from a woman with Type 1 diabetes that are genetically matched to her and to her disease.

They hope to someday use such cells as tailor-made transplants to treat or potentially even cure the disease, which affects millions and which now has few treatment options other than careful diet and regular use of insulin....

The technique they use is called somatic cell nuclear transfer — the same method used to make Dolly, the sheep who was the first mammal to be cloned, in 1996. Scientists remove the nucleus from a normal cell, clear the nucleus from a human egg cell, then inject the nucleus from the skin cell into the egg.

Various chemical or electrical tricks can be used to start the egg growing as if it had been fertilized by sperm. In this case, they used DNA from a woman with Type 1 diabetes, and they said they used an improved method to trick the egg into developing.

It got to what’s called a blastocyst — a ball of cells that has not yet begun to differentiate into the different types of cells and tissues in the body, such as nerve cells, blood cells and bone cells. They removed individual cells and used various chemical baths to direct them to form into the desired cell type — the beta cells in the pancreas that make insulin and that are destroyed in diabetes.

“I think this is going to become reality,” Dr. Dieter Egli of the New York Stem Cell Foundation, whose report is published in the journal Nature on Monday, told reporters. “It may be a bit in the future but it is going to happen.”

"Anything other than a total ban on human cloning would be virtually impossible to enforce. Cloned human embryos created for research would be widely available in laboratories and embryo farms. Once cloned embryos were available, implantation would take place. Even the tightest regulations and strict policing would not prevent or detect the birth of cloned babies."
--Former President George W. Bush

"Scientists are naive to think they can ban reproductive cloning and go ahead studying embryonic [therapeutic] cloning"
--Gregory Pence, Ph.D., bioethicist and cloning advocate

“My decision to clone myself should not be the government’s business, or Cardinal O’Connor’s, any more than a woman’s decision to have an abortion is.  Cloning is highly significant.  It’s part of the reproductive rights of every human being.”
--Randy Wicher, cloning activist

The deleterious effects of trisomy 21—the extra chromosome behind Down’s syndrome—can be seen across the entire genome, according to a study published today (April 16) in Nature. While studying a pair of monozygotic twins in which only one person had Down’s syndrome, a team led by Stylianos Antonarakis of the University of Geneva Medical School in Switzerland discovered that trisomy 21 can affect other chromosomes.

This rare twin pair allowed the researchers to compare the effects of Down’s syndrome on gene expression in two otherwise genetically identical individuals. The researchers found that in the twin with Down’s syndrome, genes in territories along the chromosomes that are highly expressed in people without the disorder showed reduced expression, while genes in territories that are normally suppressed were more highly expressed.

“The fact that they’ve got these really nice domain structures genome-wide further implicates the rising perception of the Down’s syndrome response as being more of a systems-level response, rather than . . . just the simplified perspective that we’ve had for a long time”—that the extra chromosome 21 is alone responsible for the symptoms of Down’s syndrome, said Robin Dowell of the University of Colorado at Boulder, who was not involved in the work.

“The mere addition of a small piece of DNA—about 30 megabases, or 1 percent of the genome—can disturb the entire transcriptome, all the genes of the genome. And not only disturb them, but disturb them in a specific and programmed way,” said Antonarakis

The Church has always been against third-party reproduction and that is because the Church has always been focused on the needs of the child and not on the wants of the parents.

Humans have a universal desire to love and be loved by our biological parents. That requires that we know and be known by our biological parents; a scenario purposefully denied those children of anonymous sperm or egg donation.

The Church knows that connection to our biological parents is part of the rights of a child. The Catechism of the Catholic Church states:

2376 Techniques that entail the dissociation of husband and wife, by the intrusion of a person other than the couple (donation of sperm or ovum, surrogate uterus), are gravely immoral. These techniques (heterologous artificial insemination and fertilization) infringe the child's right to be born of a father and mother known to him and bound to each other by marriage.

I look at history, and there are dads, I look at wildlife, there are dads, I look at society and there are dads. Dads are everywhere, maybe its media but I feel like I'm missing out. I feel like I will never know what it's like to be in the arms of a man who loves me unconditionally in a innocent non-sexual way, and who will be my other half. I will never know what it's like to bond with my other genetic parent, I will never know what it's like to look at the rest of nature and know I was conceived the way I was suppose to be...you know, outside a science lab....and not on a dish to be shoved into a refrigerator.

I have a tape of my donor's voice, answering questions. Some are deep queries about his personal beliefs, but others are trivial. Those are the ones that make me cry. Questions like 'what's your favorite movie?' He gave the same answer as me and it confused and delighted me. After hearing in him all the traits in me the rest of my family doesn't understand, I felt like i'd missed out on something spectacular, to be understood by the person partially responsible for my existence....  It seems odd and horrorible at the same time that two people who have never even laid eyes on each other have a child. I hate that my dad got paid. I hate that he was probably just some guy who was broke and needed a little bit of pocket cash. No matter how great of a guy he was, he just wanted the money. And even though I think about him all the time, he has no idea I that exist.

Without seemingly having given it much thought at all, our society now allows tens of thousands or more of men and women to create children who will never know one or sometimes both of their biological parents, because states allow these anonymous donations.  And this policy inherently presupposes that bearing children who have no opportunity to know their biological fathers or mothers does not deprive them of anything that is inherently theirs – as a fundamental human right.

I disagree.  I believe that it is morally wrong to put in place a social architecture that means millions of children will not know their biological parents.

Am I saying it would be better that these children not be born? I am.

Anonymous sperm and ova donation presupposes that the biological connection between parents and children is without much value at all – since in a wholesale (or shall I say, retail) manner, we sanction an ever-increasing number of kids being born who have no idea who their biological fathers and mothers are and can never find out, period.

Anonymous sperm and ova donation solves no problem of any child. It is a convenience to adults who are encountering fertility problems and would prefer the convenience of jettisoning part of their child's true life history in order to commandeer that child from its true biological father or mother.