Bobby Schindler has a column in today’s Washington Times entitled “False Compassion.” He writes about some notable food and fluids cases past and present in an overall piece against dehydrating people with cognitively impairments. He concludes strongly:

Make no mistake: thousands of conscious and unconscious persons die by deliberate dehydration every year. We only hear of the cases in which there is family disagreement. Believe me when I tell you that death by dehydration is something that no family member should ever have to witness. It is cruel and barbaric and takes days and often weeks to play itself out, torturing not only the patient but all who love them as well.

I watched my own sister anguish through 13 days without food or water and there are no words that can properly describe this inhumanity. At the end, blood appeared in her eyes because her tissues were cracking from a loss of moisture.

Tragically, killing the cognitively disabled by taking away their food and water is about as common in our nation as it is for our politicians to abandon this issue. And for reasons I still struggle to understand, deliberately dehydrating persons with brain injuries really doesn’t seem to catch the ire of most Americans, certainly not those in the media. If you did the same thing to a dog, you would rightly join Michael Vick in jail for animal abuse.

Persons with disabilities, no matter how serious, are just that–persons. They should be treated as our most precious treasures reflecting who we should be as a nation–not as damaged goods to be discarded when they outlive their “usefulness”–which, sadly, says more about our growing moral bankruptcy than it does about their intrinsic value or human worth.

Agree or disagree with Bobby on the issue of removing tube-supplied sustenance, he has the “moral authority” many in the media demand of those who comment on these issues. Check his piece out. He says a mouthful.

US scientists are taking the first step towards testing potentially hazardous chemicals on cells grown in a laboratory, without using live animals. Two government agencies are looking into the merits of using high-speed automated robots to carry out tests. The long-term goal is to reduce the cost, time and number of animals used in screening everything from pesticides to household chemicals. (BBC NEWS)

UK scientists hope to mend shattered bones and damaged cartilage using a patient’s own stem cells.
They are developing a “bioactive scaffold” to protect the stem cells and encourage them to grow into bone or cartilage when placed in the body.

The Edinburgh University team hope the technique, which uses stem cells from blood and bone marrow, will be tested in patients within two years. Surgeons said it could help repair trauma injuries too severe to heal. (BBC NEWS)

With the number of stem-cell lines rapidly increasing, technology developers are working to improve systems for culturing and efficient differentiation — all with an eye on the clinic.

The explosion in stem-cell research that followed the isolation of human embryonic stem cells1 in 1998 has seen the number of cell lines available to researchers increase dramatically. This burst may be due to the fact that embryonic stem cells are pluripotent — having the potential to generate all adult and embryonic cell types — so there are exceptional possibilities for their use in medicine. (Nature)

by Leon Kass

In his State of the Union address President Bush spoke briefly on matters of life and science. He stated his intention to expand funding for new possibilities in medical research, to take full advantage of recent breakthroughs in stem cell research that provide pluripotent stem cells without destroying nascent human life. At the same time, he continued, “we must also ensure that all life is treated with the dignity that it deserves. And so I call on Congress to pass legislation that bans unethical practices such as the buying, selling, patenting, or cloning of human life.”

As in his previous State of the Union addresses, the president’s call for a ban on human cloning was greeted by considerable applause from both sides of the aisle. But Congress has so far failed to pass any anti-cloning legislation, and unless a new approach is adopted, it will almost certainly fail again.

Fortunately, new developments in stem cell research suggest a route to effective and sensible anti-cloning legislation, exactly at a time when novel success in cloning human embryos makes such legislation urgent. Until now, the cloning debate has been hopelessly entangled with the stem cell debate, where the friends and the enemies of embryonic stem cell research have managed to produce a legislative stalemate on cloning. The new scientific findings make it feasible to disentangle these matters and thus to forge a successful legislative strategy. To see how this can work, we need first to review the past attempts and the reasons they failed. . . . (The Weekly Standard)

Reversing the effects of ageing, reprogramming genes to prevent diseases and producing clean energy are some of the biggest challenges for the next 50 years, according to a group of leading experts. The pace of advances in technology means the rate of progress will be 30 times faster in the next half century than in the past 50 years, futurologists believe — and that opens up the prospect of innovation in many fields. (Guardian)

Computer power will match the intelligence of human beings within the next 20 years because of the accelerating speed at which technology is advancing, according to a leading scientific “futurologist”.

There will be 32 times more technical progress during the next half century than there was in the entire 20th century, and one of the outcomes is that artificial intelligence could be on a par with human intellect by the 2020s, said the American computer guru Ray Kurzweil. (The Independent)