by Roy Exum
posted November 24, 2007
 Roy Exum |
Of course, you would.
Now if you were the same scientist, and the way you are going to save people is through something called a stem cell, would you tell somebody?
Of course, you would.
Finally, if the only way you found that you could get a stem cell would be from a human embryo, would you do it, or would the obvious result – that the embryo would die – be too great a mountain to climb?
In the past 10 years I’ve thought about that scenario 100 times. I’ve seen, first hand, kids on the street that one day science will figure a way to avert the suffering they must bear. I’ve seen people die of cancer because “the cupboard is bare.”
More recently, I’ve seen where doctors at Duke University are taking another look at “alternative medicine” because what we’ve got is simply not working. The chemo therapy being used to treat pancreatic cancer, for instance, isn’t enough.
So go back with me to a man named James A. Thomson and let me explain what happened when he announced he’d found a way to take a stem cell from a human embryo and alter it in a way that would affect the 220 cells we find in the human body.
I am not a scientist, nor even what I would call a “learned man,” but the way I understand this thing is that for a very fleeting short while, when a human being is still in the embryonic stage, a stem cell is kinda’ like the wild card in the deck.
What these guys can do, after working with millions of mice and monkeying around with embryos that would be destroyed by fertility clinics anyway because they have been discarded, is take one of these “wild cards” and put it in a deck that already has three kings and a low card.
You have to admit, a hand with four kings has a better chance of winning. Oh, there may be a guy to your left with aces, or even a royal flush, but if we’re talking multiple sclerosis or Hodgkin’s Disease or stage-four cancer, I’ll savor any wild card I can get.
James A. Thomson, who works at the University of Wisconsin, found a wild card. He’s the guy who came out 10 years ago and told the world he had isolated a cell that, if handled right and timed just perfect, could alter the genetic make-up of a human being.
Guess what? The religious right went crazy. Just the mention of stem cells caused elections to be turned. The overriding factor was fear, i.e. Dr. Frankenstein, because simple people such as myself didn’t understand it, not at all.
So since then this oft-battered scientist has still gone to work every day, still looked at chromosomes through some microscope and tried more ways than Thomas Alva Edison did a light bulb to break the code and, just before Thanksgiving Day, he was one of two people who announced he could change a cell that did not come from a human embryo.
Suddenly the jig is up. The ethical dilemma is solved. Nobody nor any embryo dies, although we now learn that was never really the case.
Regardless, this guy we’ve slapped and spit at and ridiculed has, in essence, ended the same crisis he created and, in the New York Times on Thursday, a fabulous story told a rare secret about him. Listen to what he told Times’ reporter Gina Kolata:
“If human embryonic stem cell research does not make you at least a little bit uncomfortable, you have not thought about it enough. I thought long and hard about whether I would do it,” Dr. Thomson admitted.
So, in the end, he did. Because of what he found, what he learned, what he was able to accomplish, it paved the way for this week’s announcement he had found another way or, more succinctly, a better way to manipulate a cell and maybe, just maybe, that can be parlayed into the answer for some paralysis, the cure for some sarcoma, even the end to what we know as AIDs.
So what kind of day you think he had Thursday at the Thanksgiving table? No more ridicule, no more taunting, no more fire-and-brimstone oratories from the simple minds among us.
Now, if you think Dr. Thomson was thankful, how about the rest of us who have buddies battling pancreatic cancer? That’s big medicine and – get this - it is all because James A. Thomson stayed in the game instead of listening to the harsh critics in the crowd.
royexum@aol.com
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