VATICAN CITY (EWTN News/CNA)—At the Vatican today, Nov. 8, former U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson urged President Obama to establish a commission to support adult stem-cell research.
“I want President Obama to bring all this adult stem-cell research together,” Thompson told EWTN News in Rome on Nov. 7.
Thompson says he wants a body created within the National Institutes of Health that will “be able to use the resources that we have in America to really put regenerative medicine into the forefront of therapies creating new breakthroughs in disease control.”
Thompson is in Rome for a three-day conference jointly organized by the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for Culture and the U.S.-based Stem for Life Foundation, which promotes adult stem-cell research. He will be joined by more than 350 other policymakers, medical experts, educators and religious leaders.
Thompson, who is a former governor of Wisconsin and planning to run for the U.S. Senate, outlined how a presidential commission could work.
The commission would bring together “private-sector business leaders,” who would then “evaluate all of the federal efforts to date surrounding regenerative medicine,” he said. That group would also make “specific recommendations to our president on how we can better coordinate these efforts and unite them with the best of private enterprise.” He noted, however, that “to date, nothing has been done” by the Obama administration.
Thompson’s idea was well-received by the rest of the launch panel, including Dr. Robin Smith, the president of Stem for Life Foundation. She told EWTN News that she found the concept “really interesting.”
“I think it is very important to get Congress and different political leaders like President Obama to understand adult stem cells,” so that “we can unite to get a more impactful outcome, decreasing needless human suffering by getting these therapies into clinics,” she said.
Stem cells are the body’s master cells. From them, all of the body’s 200-plus types of tissue ultimately grow. Their incredible versatility means they have the potential to provide replacement tissue to treat numerous disorders.
The Catholic Church approves of stem-cell research but disapproves of those cells being culled from the killing of an embryo or fetus. “Adult” stem cells are taken from the patient’s existing stem cells or from the placenta or umbilical cord at birth.
Smith explained that the use of adult stem cells avoids “the ethical dilemma posed by the use of embryonic stem cells,” because adult stem-cell research and therapy “allows us to advance scientific knowledge while protecting every stage of existence.”
She also explained that there are now more than 3,500 adult stem-cell clinical trials already creating “therapeutic benefits for things like diabetes, lupus, MS and blindness, just to name a few.”
The conference, which begins tomorrow, is entitled “Adult Stem Cells: Science and the Future of Man and Culture.”
“This conference is going to dispel a lot of the old myths and bring in a lot of education; a lot of new scientists and new reports are going to be discussed; that is going to help the world discuss adult stem cells in a new and better light,” said Thompson.
“It’s an incredibly exciting time to bring together different nations, different political leaders, different religious leaders to help us take adult stem-cell therapy to the public,” said Smith.
She believes that the conference will educate society, advance people’s understanding of the potential the research has to change culture, change lives and decrease human suffering.
Edward Pentin: Improving Communication of Pope's Early Morning Homilies
Comments
Post a Comment
I knew this would happen. When Tommy Thompson was the Governor of Wisconsin, he praised the work of Dr. Jamie Thomson, the lead researcher on embryonic stem cells at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, in three separate State of the State addresses. He also pushed for more funding for that life-destroying research, which he got. Then, when Thompson became the Secretary of Health and Human Services under Bush II, he convinced W that, if W denied funding for embryonic stem cell research, he would go down in history “as the person who stopped research on stem cells” (see http://wisbusiness.com/index.iml?Article=136796). So Bush made the compromise in August of 2001 in which federal funding would go only to research on existing lines of embryonic stem cells. Fancy that—the only existing lines at that time were at UW-Madison.
Now Thompson is running for Senate as a Republican to take the place of retiring Democratic Senator Herb Kohl. He is in a primary race against two other conservative Republicans, both of whom are pro-life. Thompson knows that if he’s going to win the primary, he needs to somehow or other cover over his previous, very enthusiastic, support of embryonic stem cell research. (And yes, he does know that it destroys human life—he’s been told that many times by many different people.) How convenient that there was a Vatican-sponsored conference happening just when the primary race is heating up. And how convenient that he just happens to come up with the idea of an adult stem cell commission (which he knows as well as anyone else is never going to happen in the Obama administration) just prior to the start of the conference and that he makes the announcement in Rome to the delight of the president of the company who is in a financial partnership with the Vatican. Can anyone else see the politics of this written all over the place?
Oh, and if he makes it through the primary, his Democratic opponent will be Tammy Baldwin, currently the Congresswoman from the 2nd district, which falls in the Diocese of La Crosse. She was one of the Catholic politicians in that diocese who was rebuked by then-Bishop Raymond Burke and admonished not to receive Communion for her pro-abortion stand just before he left to be the archbishop of St. Louis. Unfortunately, even though Thompson’s hometown is in the La Crosse Diocese, he was not residing there, so Bishop Burke was not able to likewise admonish him, otherwise he would have done so.
Post a Comment
By submitting this form, you give The National Catholic Register permission to publish this comment. Comments will be published at our discretion, and may be edited for clarity and length. For best formatting, please limit your response to one paragraph and don't hit "enter" to force line breaks.