😠 😡
Trump quietly shuts down HIV cure research to appease the religious right
"This effectively stops all of our research to discover a cure for HIV," one researcher says
https://www.lgbtqnation.com/2018/12/trump-quietly-shuts-hiv-cure-research-appease-religious-right
@tyghebright eh... this has less to do with HIV than it does ethics regarding use of fetal tissue. The writers are portraying this as an assault on HIV research or the LGBTQ community when that is a byproduct of a decision based solely on using human tissue transferred in to mice. This probably wouldn’t have flown under Obama either tbh.
Yes, use of fetal tissue has been controversial for a long time and it's a major impediment to many areas of research.
Just recently, the first paralyzed person treated with stem cells regained some use of their arms and hands -- and that's something Christopher Reeve fought for, but stem cell research was impeded
@tyghebright stem cells have also been impeded, but only in certain categories. Stem cells not derived from embryos, for example, don’t face many of the restrictions embryo-derived cells do. This has forced biology to discover a lot of new things-including how to “de-differentiate” cells back to a stem cell-type. While much less effective, it has forced us to invent things we didnt originally think possible. So it all boils down to sourcing. TLDR; Use existing alternatives, or face a huge fight.
@tyghebright right, and the desire to slow that research because of growing ethical concerns (outside of the religious right) has reached a fever pitch. The last two or three years a lot of scientists have started asking to slow certain research topics down until we have a firmer understanding of the bioethics regarding things like chimeras and genome editing. The CRISPR twins in China are the perfect example. We are inventing things faster than we are considering the ramifications right now.