Thayer made the following observations about telemed abortions:

….  Telemed abortion is the practice by which an abortion doctor from a remote location simply presses a button, which opens a drawer containing the dangerous abortion pill, after a brief teleconference call with the woman.

Telemed abortion doesn’t only result in the death of an unborn child; it strips women of their dignity by denying them the courtesy of an in-person visit from a doctor concerned for their health and well-being. It risks their lives by sending them away with no support and a drug that has led to massive bleeding and hemorrhaging, infection and even death.

So what does Planned Parenthood, the “trusted friend of women,” love so much about telemed abortions? Low overhead costs.

My superiors justified telemed abortions, lauding the financial benefits of not having to worry about or pay for specialized equipment, staff and a traveling physician – all required with surgical abortions.

When I expressed my concerns, I was “let go,” supposedly because of “downsizing.”

Turning a blind eye toward both good science and good ethics, the embryonic stem cell and cloning company, Advanced Cell Technology (ACT), has published a very preliminary online report regarding their first two patients injected with embryonic stem cell derivatives. The two patients, one who has age-related macular degeneration, the most common cause of blindness, and the other with a rare form of blindness called Stargardt’s disease, were injected with retinal cells made from human embryonic stem cells only 4 months before the report was submitted. This makes it far too early to know whether these embryonic stem cells will actually be safe or effective. In fact, it’s surprising that any reputable scientific journal would publish such very preliminary data, given the early stage of the clinical trial (which is supposed to last at least two years), the short period of time after the patients were injected, and the low numbers of patients and lack of controls.

Dr Martin Friedlander, Professor of Ophthalmology at Scripps Health in La Jolla, California pointed out the deficits and dangers of such early and incomplete reporting:

“To reach any conclusions on the safety or efficacy of two patients treated for four months without a control population for comparison is unreasonable. This is why anecdotal reports like this are not published. This falsely raises the hopes of millions of individuals suffering from these diseases.”

The paper published in the journal Lancet clearly reveals that the data are preliminary and uncertain. It mentions that one patient who showed improvement in her eye that was injected with the cells, also showed improvement in her eye that was NOT injected with the cells. The authors admit in the paper that there is a general lack of hard data:

“At present, we do not know if the transplanted cells have reduced immunogenicity or whether they will undergo rejection without immunosuppression in the long term. Similarly, we are uncertain at this point whether any of the visual gains we have recorded were due to the transplanted cells, the use of immunosuppressive drugs, or a placebo effect.”

First author Dr. Steven Schwartz has noted the likelihood of the placebo effect in several interviews. Dr. Schwartz conceded that it was “extremely unusual” for researchers to publish a study after treating only two patients out of a planned 24. But he said that was justified by the huge interest in the stem cells. ACT has been criticized in the past for overstating results, in part because it has been desperate to raise money to stay in business. The company’s stock rose 3.4 cents, or 23 percent, to 18 cents on Monday.

The safety of the patients is also still very much in question. Humans can take much longer to develop a tumor than lab mice, sometimes years. Previous research has shown that as few as two growing embryonic stem cells among millions of injected cells can lead to tumors, even if the cells are supposedly pre-differentiated. The concern regarding potential tumor formation and need for continued surveillance was noted by Dr. Sheng Ding of the Gladstone Institute:

If just a few undifferentiated stem cells are injected, “you may not see [an effect] at all, or you may be able to see it over a much longer period of time. The 4-month follow-up received by the trial patients thus far is “very short in this regard, and I think the patients need a much, much longer-term follow up to make sure there’s no tumor cells.”

It is indeed surprising that this paper was published. The preliminary nature of the paper reinforces the image of ACT noted in a recent story in Nature:

“Since the late 1990s, ACT has gained a reputation as a renegade company, accused of overhyping results to raise attention and money. Critics say that the company has damaged the field more than once with its high-profile, controversial announcements, such as one describing the company’s attempts to clone a human embryo in 2001…”

The embryonic stem cells (line MA09, currently pending review for NIH approval of taxpayer funding) used for injections into patients in the current trials are part of another embarrassing moment for ACT. Their derivation was described in a 2006 paper in which ACT claimed that they arose from single blastomeres that had been removed from human embryos, without destroying the embryos. However, the embryos had indeed been destroyed cell by cell, leading to several “corrections” to their published information. In a subsequent 2008 paper they again claimed to have accomplished derivation of embryonic stem cells without destroying an embryo, creating what they termed their NED (“no embryo destruction”) lines, but their own published data showed only 80-85% of the embryos survived the laboratory manipulation, falsifying their claim.

There are certainly better alternatives to embryonic stem cells. Similar stem cells–iPS cells–can be derived without any use of embryos; their potential is noted in the accompanying published comment. In fact, ACT scientist Bob Lanza has already said that they are planning to use iPS cells in the future, which potentially could remove the need for immunosuppressive drugs and provide an ethically-derived source of cells. However, since iPS cells are pluripotent, with a penchant to grow and make lots of cells, they face the same practical problem of tumor formation as embryonic stem cells.

A practical, as well as ethical solution, would be the use of adult stem cells. Preliminary work has shown that retinal repair could be accomplished using adult stem cells from bone marrow, or possibly even adult stem cells from within the patient’s own eye. Adult stem cells from the patient’s own eye have already been used successfully to treat corneal blindness in people.

President Obama apparently indicated to the Prime Minister of Canada, Stephen Harper, that the pipeline would be approved after the November election.  Environmentalists are a major constituency of the Democratic Party, and they oppose the pipeline for many reasons but primarily because they believe that killing the project will stop the production of unrefined oil from Canadian tar sands.  This is folly because the Chinese are more than willing to buy the oil, so the oil will be produced, and it will be consumed somewhere.

The United States imports dangerously large volumes of crude oil, but it also has massive resources that could be used to reduce our dependence on unfriendly governments who produce oil.  Yet, our current government has anti-energy policies that will inevitably lead to more importing and higher prices.

Oddly enough President Obama chose to go to Disney World on Thursday (1/19) to press the flesh and promote tourism in Florida.  Florida has an unemployment rate of 10.0%, and it depends greatly on tourism.  It has Disney World and all the nearby entertainment parks.  It has a large cruise ship industry, and it has a wonderful climate and beaches that people visit from all over the world (e.g., South Beach, Miami).

How do people get to Florida to enjoy these various tourist activities?  They consume a pretty substantial amount of fossil fuel like the stuff we won’t be getting from the Keystone XL pipeline.  As energy prices climb due to lack of production, the health of the vacation and entertainment industries will be imperiled.  I hope some Floridians asked the president about that.

Furthermore, the political Left hates energy production and the economic productivity it brings.  It doesn’t seem to have occurred to them that one of the reasons our standard of living is so high is that we use these fuels to run engines that increase our real productivity.  Take a look at the History Channel’s program “Modern Marvels” sometime.  Almost all the episodes rely on the use of fuel or electricity to run machinery that expands human productivity enormously.

The environmental movement has a basic problem with this fact.  Remember that in 1992, Al Gore wrote in his book, Earth in the Balance, that the internal combustion engine posed a greater threat to the United States than actual military enemies.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  Engines of various kinds have been one of the factors that have allowed mankind to escape the grinding poverty it had known for millennia.

The United States has 55,000 miles of oil-carrying pipelines, and Keystone XL would have expanded that total only marginally.  That was not the problem for the environmentalists.  They just want to shut down all new energy production except for inefficient renewable energy (wind, solar) that has no hope of powering our economy.  The long-term continuation of policies like this will have profound effects on the ability of the United States to grow economically and increase the standard of living for American families.  More basically, it will help determine whether many families will be able to heat there homes economically.

The American people are going to have to choose the vision of reality they endorse.

Outstanding student loan debt — which exceeds $1 trillion, more than what Americans owe on credit cards — is likely to be a major political issue this election year as students and their parents question the rising cost and value of a college education.

Sullivan presents some alarming statistics about loan defaults:

The rate of defaults rose from 7 percent in 2008 to 8.8 percent in 2009, the latest official figures available. That’s 320,194 of the 3.6 million people who began repayment that year, according to the U.S. Department of Education.

The rate in 2009 is about one in twelve – a high rate.  Concern runs from the political Right to the Left.  As a Univ. of Pittsburgh English professor, William Scott, associated with the Occupy movement observed, “Schools keep raising their tuitions because they know their students have easy access to these student loans.” “It’s almost become a type of predatory lending.”  At the same time, Rep. Ron Paul believes the loan programs should be abolished because they are “an absolute failure.”

Jay Schalin, of the excellent John William Pope Center for Higher Education Policy (Raliegh, NC), has written an op-ed in the Washington Times discussing some educational reviews that may be coming in China:

China’s state-run universities have been churning out graduates so quickly that many can’t find good jobs, even in a booming economy.

In response, China will “soon start evaluating college majors by their employment rates, downsizing or cutting degree programs in which the employment rate for graduates falls below 60 percent for two consecutive years,” the Wall Street Journal reported recently.

Much is imperfect with this authoritarian approach, but it seems more sensible than having no feedback in a system – like ours – that continues to sink students in unproductive majors and degree programs with loads of debt.  (See the Wall Street Journal article by Laurie Burkitt who writes from Beijing.)

As Schalin observes – after noting that employment rates are not the only evaluative measure that should be used:

But using data on the employment of graduates is still a valuable evaluation tool, and it serves as a useful guide for reforming higher education.

The Chinese exhibit hard-nosed common sense by looking at the actual results of their higher-education system; forward-looking U.S. public universities should do the same. If they won’t end their excesses voluntarily, perhaps it’s time for state legislatures to consider Chinese-style standards.

Results matter; it’s time to judge universities on how well graduates perform once they’ve left the security of the ivory tower.

The briefing schedule was set back in December, as well as the date for oral arguments in the appeal.

“He went home in very good shape,” said Dr. Macchiarini. Macchiarini said that Mr. Lyles adult stem cells were placed onto the synthetic windpipe scaffold and grown in a bioreactor for two days, then transplanted into his body after removal of his tumorous trachea. The cells continue to grow and differentiate after implantation into the patient. Macchiarini pointed out:

“We’re using the human body as a bioreactor to promote regeneration.”

Because his own adult stem cells were used, there was no need for drugs to prevent his body from rejecting the transplanted windpipe; use of anti-rejection drugs, which have numerous side-effects, is a common problem in transplants using donated organs.

This is the second synthetic trachea transplant. The first transplant occurred in June 2011, and the results of that first synthetic trachea transplant were published in The Lancet. Macchiarini had done eight previous artificial trachea transplants, using cadaveric trachea stripped of cells and then coated with the patient’s own adult stem cells. The synthetic tracheal scaffold was designed and built by a Columbus, Ohio company and the bioreactor used to initiate growth of the adult stem cells on the scaffold for two days was built by a Massachusetts company.

In the meantime, Adult Stem Cells continue to provide the gold standard for patient treatment, and the only stem cell type with published positive results at improving health and saving lives.

It isn’t just that their unemployment rate is higher than that of any other group in the general populace, but the young are being subjected to “record-smashing college debt levels.”  This is taking place while the national debt explodes.  Youth employment stands at 17.4%, and college debt has reached $26,300 for the typical graduate.  The national debt now stands about 100% of GDP – 15 trillion dollars.  More significantly in one sense: the interest payments alone are now equal to $3,000 per taxpayer.

Young America’s Foundation recognizes the economic problems facing the young and has developed a “Youth Misery Index.”  The Index reflects a value for youth unemployment plus college debt levels and per capita national debt.  This is a good idea, and I look forward to the Index’s release each year.

(One suggestion might be to adjust the national debt component to also reflect the finding of Reinhart and Rogoff (This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly) that debt levels above 90% of GDP have a detrimental effect on long-term growth and stability.)