Research Using Fetal Tissue

Hello HuffPo! Some of you may know me from junkscience.com or healthnewsdigest.com. My main focus here will be on science, or what passes for science these days. Many people of good will are not aware that our government spends more than $400 billion per year on R & D. Regrettably, a substantial amount of that ends of being little more than a form of academic welfare, for research that has almost no chance of ever leading to anything practical, and in many cases does not even add to so-called "basic knowledge." By way of example (and I will have many more), let's take a look at a current hot topic: Research using fetal tissue. This is hardly a new phenomenon. Fetal tissue has been harvested for medical research for years. Even before abortion was legalized, other sources were tapped, and according to an article by AP science writer Malcolm Ritter, this practice dates back to the 1930s. Ritter, and many others, like to invoke the 1954 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine. As Ritter puts it, "The 1954 Nobel Prize in medicine was awarded for work with fetal tissue that led to developing a vaccine against polio." Not so fast... According to the Nobel Foundation, that particular prize was awarded jointly to John Franklin Enders, Thomas Huckle Weller, and Frederick Chapman Robbins "for their discovery of the ability of poliomyelitis viruses to grow in cultures of various types of tissue." Indeed, many types of tissue were used besides human embryonic tissue, and the famous Sa...
Source: Science - The Huffington Post - Category: Science Source Type: news