Geron bails on embryonic stem cell research

Reposting this from Jill Stanek's blog because of the implications and ties to UW-Madison, the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, etc.

Out of nowhere Geron Corporation announced last week it was not only halting the first clinical trial of embryonic stem cell treatment on humans but getting out of the embryonic stem cell business altogether.

To understand how big a blow to the embryonic stem cell industry this was, you first must know it was Geron that funded the University of Wisconsin Madison’s original research back in 1995, which resulted in the first cultures of embryonic stem cells. It was Geron that started this whole mess.

Geron went on to comprise one-third of the triune that controlled which company or university got access to embryonic stem cell lines, along with the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation and the National Institutes of Health.

Read the rest here.

Old School Bucky

Bill Sagal '51 tries on his mascot head with designer Connie Conrad and Homecoming chair Bill Sachse '50. Photo Courtesy UW-Madison Archives

Paul Bunyan's Axe

We got it and we want to keep it.

UW back after Badger Catholic Student Org

Dinesh D’Souza debates atheist at UW

University of Wisconsin student government members deliberated a request Monday night by the Multicultural Student Center to alter over $5,000 of the organization’s initial budget, which the Student Services Finance Committee chair ultimately denied.

MCSC representatives said they wanted to move the money from funding direct services for students to provide for traveling expenditures and fees for the organization’s trainers.

SSFC Chair Sarah Neibart said she decided to deny the budget altercation as she read the application because the budget proposal was inconsistent from what the committee had approved the previous fall.

During its Thursday meeting, SSFC is expected to take up a possible violation from the religious student organization Badger Catholic.

Badger Herald

I see they have a new website as well.  You might recognize the location of the picture.

UW Badger Catholic "Night On the Town"

Badger Catholic will be putting on it's 2nd annual date auction to raise money in an effort to subsidize the cost of Break Service Trips put on by the Badger Catholic Service Team!

Event Info:
November 4, 2011 7-11pm
Gordon Commons
... Hors d'oeuvre, Auction, and Dancing
$2 Entrance Fee

This "Date Night" is an awesome opportunity for girls and guys to hangout, get to know each other, and enjoy an evening out on the town together.

This is how it works: 3 guys will get together and plan a date evening for three lovely ladies. The date should include a dinner of some sort and a fun, creative activity!

HOWEVER - be sure to keep your identity under wraps as the ladies will be bidding solely on the description of your "date"...so be CREATIVE!! Guys, also please remember that splitting the cost of the date between group members is your contribution to the fundraiser!

The guys' groups are due FRIDAY, OCTOBER 22nd and descriptions are due FRIDAY, OCTOBER 28th!!!!

Once the dates have been planned, all guys and girls will get together on Nov. 4th at 7pm in Gordon Commons for the Date Auction ($2 entry fee per person), which includes appetizers, dancing, and a live auction for the dates! So ladies will also form groups of 3 to bid on the date description you think sounds best! Girls will then be introduced to the guys providing the date and the group of 6 will get together on a later day for their night on the town! :)

details at UW Badger Catholic

related AOM:  Stop Hanging Out With Women and Start Dating Them

On Wisconsin

Matt and I (Virginia) were emailing this morning about the state of Wisconsin sports (a coworker of mine would like Ron Roenicke driven out of Milwaukee, but that's another post). I mentioned that sadly, no one wanted to talk about Badger football this morning with me and deluged Matt with tales of my favorite Badger games. Matt said, ummm hey you know this blog I have? Go share with Badger nation.

Given that the BCS complaint line over rankings has already formed, let's do some reminiscing over my favorite Badger games as a student...
- The game where Bucky was arrested and taken out in handcuffs for crowd-surfing;

- The 2003 Wisconsin-Ohio State game (back when Maurice Clarett played for OSU, remember that?) when students rushed the field after UW beat the No. 3 ranked Buckeyes;
- And I have no idea during which of my undergrad years this happened... but someone in the student section smuggled in a blow-up doll and dressed it in clothes so it looked like a real person. The student section did the "pass it back, pass it back" and when the doll got to the last row, they threw it over the edge of the stadium. Security freaked out and thought it was a real person that got tossed over. I have matured since then... but to be young again.

Also, you may have heard about the UW Athletic Department asking students to end some of their chants... Couple thoughts: 1. Welcome to the Big Ten, Nebraska! 2. Did they seriously ask students to be "more creative"? Uhhhmmm... 3. Camp Randall wasn't named #2 in the top 5 most intimidating stadiums by ESPN because there's daisies along the sideline...

The New York Times did an awesome write-up of the history of "Jump Around." Read it! UW beat Purdue the day Jump Around was first played, wayyyyyy back in 1998. In 2003, while Camp Randall was under construction, Jump Around was not played due to concerns that those in the press box found the movement unsettling (teeheee... jokes about reporters here...) and a sure-fire tradition was cemented.

BadgerHerald: UW Badger Catholic right to receive student funding

Our humble university has decided to capitulate and pay legal costs to an unusual group.

No, it’s not a center for diversity. And it’s not my personal party fund either.

It’s the Badger Catholic student group. In 2007, the group was turned down for a funding request for religious activities. The university had denied the group a large sum of money (something to the tune of 35,000 clams) because it is seen as “religious.” The debate quickly devolved into an argument of separation of church and state. A look at the distribution of segregated fees showed that the university had given money to them before. The report did not go into specifics, but either the group asked for money for non-religious events or the university didn’t seem to have a problem with religious activities earlier.

Of course Badger Catholic is religious, but that shouldn’t keep the university from sharing a bit of that large stack of segregated fees (the same seg fees that buy the condoms at the Sex Out Loud booth. Go grab some!). The First Amendment is quite clear about the freedom of Badger Catholic to do what it likes, and the university is wrong to deny them even the smallest fraction of the much-coveted bounty (feel free to take a look and see how much cash was collected in the name of segregated fees — more than $1 million). Segregated fees are paid with your tuition at the start of each semester. This past semester was approximately $700 per student — not a small sum if each of the 40,000 students has to pay up. What doesn’t go the Natatorium and SERF (and other maintenance items) can be distributed to those who request it.

In their attempt to turn down the church-and-state-mixing Badger Catholics, the university’s legal fees ended up coming to almost $500,000. Not only that, but they wasted a lot of time on lawyers, appeals and the 7th U.S. Circuit Court.

The university claimed that allocating money to Badger Catholic would appear as if they were endorsing the beliefs of that group. But the UW has allocated money to many groups that could be interpreted as “endorsement.” Not everyone agrees with ASM or those awesome glow-in-the-dark condoms from Sex Out Loud, yet they receive seg fee money without much hassle.

continue at The Badger Herald

Note: The Badger Catholic blog and the UW Badger Catholic Student Org are two separate groups.  

Chancellor of UW-Madison defends university's fetal research

More follow-up on the issue of aborted fetal tissue used in research. Backstory here.

Rep. Andre Jacque has an excellent op-ed in today's Milwaukee Journal Sentinel:

Respect for human dignity is essential in the authorization and conduct of scientific research, a point underscored by numerous and horrific past failures to establish or follow such protocols. Yet as a University of Wisconsin-Madison graduate with substantial coursework in the biological sciences, I heard the declaration from more than one of my professors that the ethical questions surrounding pushing the boundaries of scientific inquiry should be "set aside and dealt with later" if there was "great potential" for medical breakthroughs.

Imagine what atrocities can be justified by such a philosophy! We can do better. I have introduced Assembly Bill 214 to establish reasonable standards for human tissue research and to prohibit the sale or use of aborted fetal body parts for experimentation or other purposes.

The whole op-ed is outstanding. Read the entirety here. Wish I had written that myself!

The chancellor of UW-Madison sent the below letter attacking Rep. Jacque's bill to all legislators. Spin, spin, spin. The letter is a testament to the degree of intellectual rationalization and modernism in our society as a whole. See the line, "Nothing we are doing is illegal.".............. Which is the whole point of the legislation! Everything Hitler did was legal, too, remember that?

UW Fetal Research

More on fetal tissue research from the Milwaukee Journal

A follow-up post from yesterday's post on using aborted fetal tissue in research.

On Sunday, there was a column in the Milwaukee Journal opposing a ban on aborted fetal tissue research.

I submitted a letter to the editor and it will be published tomorrow (or you can read it online today.)

And here is the Milwaukee Journal editorial board on the issue, stating moral concerns hold no sway in this brave new world we're living in.

In a blog post on the issue, the Milwaukee Journal states they will be publishing commentary from Medical College of Wisconsin researchers this week (MCW performs research with aborted body parts, as does UW-Madison).

Catholic doctors/medical professionals, please weigh in. The time is now.

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel columnist: "Ban on fetal tissue research would be a mistake"

From Pro-Life Wisconsin:

The below article was in the Sept. 10 edition of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and the Sept. 11 edition of the Wisconsin State Journal. Tom Still, president of the Wisconsin Technology Council, writes about Rep. Andre Jacque's bill, currently in the Wisconsin legislature, that would ban the use of aborted fetal body parts in research projects in the state. Read the bill here. Despite Still's lengthy list of medical research benefiting from aborted fetal tissue, one cannot escape the fact that the purported benefit derives from human beings that are killed and experimented upon without their consent.

The legislation bans persons from knowingly and for valuable consideration acquiring, receiving, or transferring a fetal body part. It also bans persons from knowingly providing, receiving, or using for experimentation a fetal body part. Fetal body part is defined to mean a cell, tissue, organ, or other part of an unborn child who is aborted by an induced abortion.

University of Wisconsin (UW) officials already attacked the bill, claiming that it will have a “chilling effect” on the biomedical research UW Madison is currently conducting using aborted fetal tissue. Click here for a Capital Times article detailing the UW’s opposition to AB 214 and Rep. Jacque’s and PLW’s response.

There is documented evidence of UW conducting research on human fetal brain and pancreatic tissue, most recently a 2000 fetal brain cell study conducted by Su-Chun Zhang of the UW-Madison Department of Medical Sciences used immature neural cells from fetal human brain tissue of 15-20 gestation weeks “after elective termination of intrauterine pregnancies” to study neurological disorders including multiple sclerosis and Parkinson’s disease. The study acknowledged Dr. Dennis Christenson, a late-term abortionist, for his “assistance in this project.”

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel:

Ban on fetal tissue research would be a mistake

Tom Still

A report last week in PLoS Biology, a peer-reviewed scientific journal, offers a ready example of why Wisconsin lawmakers should tread carefully around a proposal to ban research using fetal tissue.

Researchers at the University of California and Texas A&M discovered that a somewhat mysterious soft tissue found in the fetus during early development in the womb plays a vital role in the formation of mature beta cells, the sole source of the body's insulin.

Scientists believe the discovery may lead to new ways of addressing Type I and Type II diabetes, conditions that have reached epidemic proportions in the United States and beyond.

It just the latest example of how researchers in Wisconsin and beyond use cells derived from human fetal tissue to pursue cures for chronic diseases, to develop and produce vaccines, and to conduct basic research on a wide range of human health issues.

A bill introduced in the Wisconsin Legislature would make it a crime for Wisconsin researchers to continue using those cells, even though they have done so legally, ethically and effectively for 50 years or more.

Lawmakers who believe they are merely standing firm against abortion should think twice about the far-reaching effects of this bill on medical research and the state's innovation economy.

Assembly Bill 214 and Senate Bill 172 would prohibit "a person knowingly and for valuable consideration acquiring, receiving or otherwise transferring a fetal body part in this state."

The identical bills define cells and tissues as fetal body parts, and they also ban "providing, receiving or using for experimentation a fetal body part" in Wisconsin - even if there was no "valuable consideration."

If passed, the bill would effectively halt valuable work in scores of laboratories at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the Medical College of Wisconsin and beyond, shut down long-standing research projects and essentially chase many researchers and emerging companies out of the state.

Click here to read the rest. To submit a letter to the editor, click here.

Madison marathon to subsidize abortionist's slush fund

From Pro-Life Wisconsin:



The 3rd Running of the Madison Mini-Marathon & 5K takes place this Saturday, August 20.

From the Madison Marathon website:

The funds raised through this event will be deposited into a fund called “Healthy Women, Healthy Babies.” This fund was created to promote awareness about healthy lifestyles of women of all ages and how their decisions to make healthy choices impact not only their own lives, but the lives of their current and future family members. The purpose of the fund is to provide discretionary support to the Chair and aid the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology in its clinical, academic and public service roles with support from grateful patients, alumni, friends and the community.

For starters, Laurel Rice, chair of the UWHC Authority’s ob/gyn department, performs abortions at Planned Parenthood in Madison.

Read the rest here.

UW-Madison confirms ongoing use of aborted baby parts in research

From Pro-Life Wisconsin:

In mid-July, I wrote about UW-Madison opposing potential legislation that would ban the use of aborted fetal parts in research projects in the state.

That legislation was introduced last week Tuesday, authored by Rep. Andre Jacque. Read the bill here.

The legislation bans persons from knowingly and for valuable consideration acquiring, receiving, or transferring a fetal body part. It also bans persons from knowingly providing, receiving, or using for experimentation a fetal body part. Fetal body part is defined to mean a cell, tissue, organ, or other part of an unborn child who is aborted by an induced abortion.

University of Wisconsin (UW) officials are already attacking the bill, claiming that it will have a “chilling effect” on the biomedical research UW Madison is currently conducting using aborted fetal tissue. Click here for a Capital Times article detailing the UW’s opposition to AB 214 and Rep. Jacque’s and PLW’s response.

Click here [PDF] for PLW's legislative memo detailing the UW’s grisly research on human fetal body parts.

Federal law prohibits the interstate trafficking of human fetal body parts. Wisconsin’s intrastate commercial activity must have a similar prohibition so that we can guarantee the highest ethical standards of academic research and medical care in our state. Pro-Life Wisconsin thanks Representative Jacque for introducing AB 214 and defending the human dignity of our aborted brothers and sisters.

Why would UW-Madison oppose such a law? Shouldn't the state's flagship university be concerned with the education of students (not to mention human beings that will never experience college, due to being aborted)?

There is documented evidence of UW conducting research on human fetal brain and pancreatic tissue, most recently a 2000 fetal brain cell study conducted by Su-Chun Zhang of the UW-Madison Department of Medical Sciences used immature neural cells from fetal human brain tissue of 15-20 gestation weeks “after elective termination of intrauterine pregnancies” to study neurological disorders including multiple sclerosis and Parkinson’s disease. The study acknowledged Dr. Dennis Christenson, a former Madison abortionist, for his “assistance in this project.”

And now we know UW is currently using aborted baby parts in research. UW's vaunted research facilities have turned into a Communist-style house of horrors. You know who else performs research on human beings? Cuba, Russia [during the WWI era] , China, Germany [during Hitler's regime], Korea...