Saving Alex: Mainstream Media Ignores Success of Adult Stem Cell Treatments

Bioethics   |   Steven Ertelt   |   Jul 6, 2010   |   9:00AM   |   WASHINGTON, DC

Saving Alex: Mainstream Media Ignores Success of Adult Stem Cell Treatments

by Maria Vitale
LifeNews.com Opinion Columnist
July 6, 2010

LifeNews.com Note: Maria Vitale is an opinion columnist for LifeNews.com. She is the Public Relations Director for the Pennsylvania Pro-Life Federation and Vitale has written and reported for various broadcast and print media outlets, including National Public Radio, CBS Radio, and AP Radio.

Alex R. Szeles has lived the American dream. The Pennsylvania native married his high school sweetheart, became successful in several businesses, raised four children, and has lived to see 18 grandchildren and one great-grandchild.

In an op-ed piece in the Patriot-News newspaper, he recalls receiving the shock of his life in April of 2007, when he was diagnosed with multiple myeloma, a cancer of the bone marrow’s plasma cells. “My prognosis was that if treatments were to be started immediately, they could possibly buy me two years. But I wanted more.”

So Alex and his wife Dory journeyed to the University of Arkansas and the Myeloma Institute for Research and Therapy. Alex’s relief came by way of adult stem cell transplants.

As he says in the Patriot-News, “I love the life that my wife and I have built together. I am fighting for my life with every fiber of my being. I have beaten the odds and am now 36 months past the date of my diagnosis.”

Alex notes that adult stem cells have successfully treated more than 70 diseases, according to the Coalition of Americans for Research Ethics (www.stemcellresearch.org). As he points out in the Patriot-News piece, “Adult stem cells have alleviated ailments such as diabetes and Parkinson’s disease, and they carry with them none of the controversy that marks embryonic stem cell research, which has cured not a single mouse and involves the killing of human embryos.”

Alex goes on to say, “I am not willing to have another life—tiny though it may be—cut short so that I might have a longer life. I stand as a living example of the success of stem cell research, entirely ethical research, which gives hope and life and harms no one.”

Unfortunately, the mainstream media largely ignore the phenomenal successes of adult stem cell research, focusing instead on the literal dead-end represented by embryonic stem cell research. As the Coalition states, ”If the goal is to put patients, not patents, first, and provide near term benefits but at lesser long term profits, then adult stem cells are, from a therapeutic perspective, clearly preferable.”

Adult stem cell research represents sound science and good business. If a respected businessman such as Alex Szeles is willing to bet his life on it, it is worthy of greater respect and more research dollars. The public relations machine behind embryonic stem cell research is just another giant myth-maker, selling people on the false hope that embryo-killing transplants will cure what ails them.

In years to come, it may be that Americans will finally see through the lies of unscrupulous members of the biotech industry and realize that “embryonic stem cell research” is just another term for disaster.

 

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