More of the same
Last Monday Declan wrote to the head of the Catholic Church in Britain, Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor, in his capacity as the Archbishop of the Diocese of Westminster, regarding the Sisters of Mercy Dellow Centre (the email letter is presented in the previous blog). The Archbishop's House hasn't acknowledged receipt of the letter yet, but meanwhile we are dealing with more of the same – only yesterday afternoon, while Declan was at his pitch selling the Big Issue (a magazine sold by homeless people on registered street pitches), another Big Issue vendor was doing the same no more than five metres from the pitch; Declan had to lodge a complaint with head office. A guy that frequently sits beside Declan while he is in the internet café and plays chess online, on Thursday afternoon did the same with me in the Idea Store Whitechapel while I was working away. I don't have to be reminded of what this seeks to communicate: that we should forget about civil liberties and give up the fight; that whatever move we make will be counteracted one way or another. It would appear this is the case.
Take washing: we were barred from the Methodist Church Whitechapel Mission due to concerns about our safety – no, no kidding; recently we were more or less barred from the public toilets in Liverpool Street Station; and when Declan was reduced to washing in the Dellow men's washroom, he was so hassled by the homeless while in there he now washes and shaves in parks. Take Declan's petition to the UN in support of research cloning of embryos and stem cells: on 29 January the Tower Hamlets Council's Idea Store Whitechapel imposed a 3-hour limit on computer use on both our membership cards; when we were still able to do our work in comes SpamCop's report accusing Declan of spamming; currently it is impossible, from the Idea Store Whitechapel, to access Declan's draft mail box, where Google Mail keeps any saved document (no such problem in an internet café or with my Google Mail account) – on 26 January Declan's Google Mail was raided and 300 draft documents, which included the names and email addresses of over 2,500 scientists, were deleted for good. As for the porch we sleep in: it is hardly used by anybody (see blog of 26 March "We are seeking to raise £4,000") and yet on 22 February two police officers came to tell us they had an order to evict us; and since mid-April the cleaner that from January had been going in and out through the porch door every weekday morning between 5.00am and 5.30am, is now going in at 4.00am - yesterday morning at 5.15am (we get up at 4.30am), while Declan was off putting away our cardboard, this cleaner came out with a mop; I hardly had the time to step down to the pavement, our packed bags still in the porch. (It is a pity he wasn't there later in the evening to mop the beer somebody had spilled on the porch floor.)
Apart from being well motivated, the homeless that target Declan don’t seem to have much else in common – we are just a couple in their mid-forties who keep themselves to themselves; I spend most of my time in the library, while Declan spends most of his walking everywhere, in particular for food. The guy that is so fond of shouting at us, be it in the Dellow or in the Manna Centre (whose building is provided rent-free by the Catholic Archdiocese of Southwark), for example that I am going to be sorted out or found one morning with a knife in my back, is a resident of the local Salvation Army hostel. The guy that regularly appears out of nowhere and shouts at us that we are “f***ing rats” and “c**ts” helps out in one of the local markets. The big Pole that booted Declan hard in the calf while in the Manna three weeks ago has little or no English. The guy that almost assaulted Declan in the Dellow men's washroom on 1 April probably doesn’t count: he could have interpreted the staff member’s words "What are you going to do about it?" as a carte blanche to continue (see blog “Declan narrowly escapes being assaulted”). The two homeless who on Tuesday afternoon – the day after Declan emailed Cardinal Murphy-O'Connor – began shouting in the courtyard of the Manna about this 46-year-old guy (yeah, Declan’s age) who is going to be put on a drip, Declan had never seen before.
The April issue of the journal Cell Stem Cell has published the finding of researchers at Johns Hopkins Institute for Cell Engineering that has uncovered the molecular underpinnings of one of the earliest steps in human development using human embryonic stem cells. One reason for the excitement, they say, is that the system can provide a research model to study very early human development, including the formation of placenta which develops from the same early embryo. It is virtually impossible, the investigators say, to use anything other than human embryonic stem cells to gather information of this kind. "The finding was serendipitous and at the same time a very important addition to our understanding of early human development," says Dr Linzhao Cheng, an associate professor of gynecology and obstetrics and co-director of the stem cell program at Johns Hopkins. "This is one area of stem cell biology where human and mouse differ significantly and we never would have discovered this if we had limited our studies to using only mouse embryonic stem cells. Adult human stem cells just didn't work for this."
Another important breakthrough is published in the 23 April advanced online issue of the journal Nature. An international research team, led by a Canadian stem-cell scientist, has successfully turned human embryonic stem cells into three types of heart cells. The breakthrough, said Dr Gordon Keller, director of the McEwen Centre for Regenerative Medicine at University Health Network in Toronto, marks a significant step towards the test-tube creation of functioning heart tissue and in the future could lead to new strategies for repairing damaged hearts following a heart attack. Though it is not the first time heart cells have been made from embryonic stem cells, it is the first time scientists have been able to find the right "recipe" to direct stem cells to produce only the progenitor heart cells which are able to make three major types of cell essential for a healthy heart.
These two important discoveries, I am afraid, didn’t make it into the website of the religious organisation “DoNoHarm: The Coalition of Americans for Research Ethics” (a website which comes recommended by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops). In fact, spend twenty minutes browsing through its pages and you would be forgiven for thinking that adult stem cells and human induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells have delivered the knock-out blow to human embryonic stem cells – Alan Trounson, head of the California Institute of Regenerative Medicine in San Francisco, who recently told Nature Reports Stem Cells that "excessive" media attention on iPS cell research could "separate science from reality", won’t appear in the DoNoHarm website either. (Created from adults cells by a simple genetic trick, iPS cells seem to have regained an embryonic ‘stemness’ that might allow them to become any type of cell in the body. Members of the International Stem Cell Forum (ISCF) meeting on 28 February in San Francisco issued the following statement: “The ISCF supports stem cell research using both human embryonic and adult stem cells. The Forum also recognises that the demonstration of human induced Pluripotent Stem (iPS) cells opens up an exciting area of stem cell research. The technology is at a very early stage however and many questions remain unanswered such as the functional relationship of iPS cells to human embryonic stem cells, both of which are important to moving the entire field of stem cell research toward application and clinical therapies.”)
Stanton Gerson, director of the Center for Stem Cell and Regenerative Medicine in Cleveland, commenting on Ohio's Ban on Human Cloning SB 174 (which has yet to clear a Senate committee after introduction last year) said: ''I find it unwise to suggest that the Legislature should dictate appropriate scientific discovery''. Perhaps the same should apply to religious groups.
