Does Dr. Hwang Really Suk?

So a couple of months ago I was listening to NPR and I heard this story about a South Korean scientist who got busted for paying his female lab workers for their eggs, so he could use them in his stem cell research. I didn't care much about that. However, whenever I hear that some other country has the brains not to hyper-regulate something with as much potential as stem cell research, I get a woody. What really got my attention is that Dr. Hwang Woo Suk claimed to have successfully cloned human embryos. As is often the case, the smaller news story of this scientist paying his female lab workers for their ova grew in the larger one of his success in cloning human embryos. Shortly thereafter, it was then revealed that he faked all his research and his results couldn't be reproduced. Know what this reminded me of? Remember fusion in a jar? Remember how every time a lab was able to do it they'd publish their findings and then not be able to reproduce results a week later?

A Quick Primer for Those of Us
Who Don't Know Why Cloning Human Embryos is a Good Thing

First off, when we say embryos, we're not talking about the 3-5 month old shrimp that are beginning to look like people. We're talking about clumps of cells no more complicated than the dollop of gray matter you'd kill by having too much fun at a bar one night. Those clumps are made up almost entirely of stem cells. Stem cells are like factory blanks—you can use them for anything. Have to spend your life in a wheel chair because your spine's been severed in a freak croquet mishap? Inject a few stem cells into the damaged area and they become—holy shit!—brand spankin' new spinal cells. Lose your sight because of damage along your optic nerve? (First of all, stop staring directly at Pat Robertson when he's talking.) Lather on a few stem cells and marvel as the windshield of life is defrosted before you. Pretty neat, huh? Pretty life/world-changing? Pretty threatening if you make your living off of human biological woes, but we'll get to that in a minute.

There are two main hurtles to stem cells changing the world. The first is that stem cells don't grow on trees. Unless you're looking for arboreal stem cells...probably. It would seem like the only place to establish a reliable harvest of human stem cells is from humans. We can get that from a couple of different places, bone marrow for one, but it's not easy and the quality of the stem cells isn't as good as those harvested from embryos. The second major hurtle is rejection. If the stem cells don't come with your specific DNA signature, your body won’t dig them and they won't work. They might even be more poison than cure. Rejection just sucks, doesn't it? And you thought it was tough having that half-ugly girl at the dance look at you like you had bean sprouts growing out of your nose. I mean, what's with that? She was totally in your league, what with the harelip and that flat chest? Man, anyway, so you have to make sure the stem cells won't pull a Cynthia Stankoski on you. The way to solve both problems is to have a perfect copy of yourself, a clone. That way when you harvest stem cells from your own clone, it's like going back in time to when you were just a clump of embryo (not even a shrimp yet, remember) and taking stem cells from yourself. And you would never reject yourself, now would you?

A Quick Primer for Those of Us
Who Don't Know How Cloning Works

Okay, here's how you make a clone. You take a human egg, unfertilized, and then you jab it with a very small needle. You then suck out all the genetic info. that has come with the egg from the woman who minted it. You now have a blank ovum. Now, you take a cell from the subject to be cloned. Ideally, it'll be a cell that's got easily accessible genetic programming because you have to take another really small needle and suck that out too. You then transfer this genetic programming to the blank ovum. Finally, and I love this part because it's so Mary Shelley, you introduce an electric charge to the ovum to initiate cell division. The genetic info. in the ovum tells the egg to become an embryo, but an embryo that is an exact copy of the subject to be cloned. If you let the embryo develop into a full human and deliver the baby, you'll have a twin of the subject to be cloned. But for the purposes of using stem cells to cure what ails us, we would harvest the cells before the embryo ever developed that far. And thus far, fully developed and birthed clones (at least in the animal trials that have been carried out) don’t seem to live very long.

The above process, by the way, could also be the recipe for a really funny practical joke. Say you're an Asian male, South Korean, and you knock up your South Korean wife. Now, imagine your wife and her geneticist friend (say he's her favorite cousin and they love to play tricks on you) follow the above formula. Instead of getting a South Korean infant nine months down the road, you might see a wrinkly baby Pat Robertson and hilarity would, of course, ensue.

CFRWOWRE Fears & Loathes Doctor Hwang

So, now we know why stem cells are good to have and how we get them. It's the harvest of these cells from human cloned embryos that has caused such a furor in the past few years. (Actually, science types and clergy types have been arguing about this stuff since the sixties, but it's only really come to a head recently because we can actually do this stuff now.) Folks with horrible injuries and/or incurable diseases are interested in further stem cell research because they would like to be cured now, thank you. And who can blame them for not wanting to forget their own children's faces or being able to wipe their own asses? I have asthma and could really get behind not having to use a fast-acting inhaler every time I want to go to the gym or am around a cat for more than a minute. But there is a vocal and powerful contingent—just for fun we'll call them the Christian Fundamentalist Right Wing Oppressors Who Run Everything or CFRWOWRE for short—who are diametrically opposed to furthering stem cell research as long as it involves the cloning of human embryos. They like to site the similarity of abortion to the cloning/harvesting procedure and/or the whole not playing god argument. I'm not going to get into who's right and who's wrong (CFRWOWRE is wrong) here, I just want to establish that there are two sides to this argument and that one side would be happy to see stem cell research set back whenever possible.

There's another part of the CFRWOWRE that prefers to play it cool and quiet—the big companies, big pharmaceutical companies specifically. (By the by, big companies don't have a religious affiliations per se. They just glom on to whomever is currently pulling the strings. If it's a nice, mostly secular boy from Arkansas who's got a problem with food and turning down nice Jewish pussy, they'll glom onto him. If it's a former alcoholic/coke addict with the IQ of a tadpole, evangelical leanings and the morals of a...a Republican, well, you get the picture.) We're talking about an industry that makes more money than most other industries combined. That alone doesn't make them evil. I like to make money, too, and I'm not evil. Hell, I'm the Metatron of righteousness. What makes them evil is that they'll do almost anything to ensure steady streams of it, great gushing, pulsating bleeders of it. Nothing makes Big Pharma happier than when people have a headache. Successful stem cell research scares the shit out of them because no one would have to pay for aspirin anymore. So, here's the conspiracy theory...

Big Pharma Shut Down Dr. Hwang
Just Like
Big Oil Shut Down Cold Fusion

At RITB we concentrate not just on the conspiracy theory itself, but on the deeper motives behind those perpetrating it. So, if we accept that Big Pharma and their flunkies in CFRWOWRE shut down and covered up Dr. Hwang's ground-breaking results in human stem cell cloning because they don't want to lose money, we have to ask the following question:

Why are they so afraid to lose money?

I have been poor. I know that not having any money sucks, but we're not talking about that. We're talking about sums so large that it would change the nature of world economies if Big Pharma suddenly became somewhat irrelevant. It would also change the nature of power in the world as well. A great deal of the reason why the proletariat stays down is because a large portion of the proletariat has a cold. If the proletariat doesn't have to concentrate all its energy on dying of one plague or another, they might be able to concentrate of a making a few changes. But in all honesty, I don't think the big decision makers are thinking about this as much as they are thinking about their share holders. I truly believe that most of the people in charge aren't deep enough to see much farther past the cabbage. In order to do so would require a psychological sophistication that most humans don't have, let alone most of the people in charge. You don't get to be in charge by being wise about your true psychological drives and then having the strength to do something about that. The people who do have those abilities are not corporate CEOs or high-ranking members of the House or Senate. They are not George W. Bush. They are not even the Dalai Lama. They are the rare guy in Kentucky or Cambodia with who farms for a living and fucking loves it. Loves it. They are the monks and atheists who would like nothing more in life than to sit in a ray of sunshine and just be. These are the people who know that fear is useless and know enough to think about stuff like that. These are the people who do not fear.

So the answer to the question "Why are they so afraid to lose money?" is simply this: They fear. Fear is what motivates people like this. Fear is what drives them. If we want to make it so that they will cease their impediments to progress, we have to make them afraid. You know who's a perfect example of this? Nancy Reagan. The former first lady is a poster child for CFRWOWRE except when it comes to matters of stem cell research because her late husband, the Gipper, might not have turned into a piece of kale had he been able to take advantage of it. She was afraid and suddenly got the hell out of the way. Her son, Ron, atually stumped for the Dems in ’04 for christ’s sake. What we really need is such a huge health threat that Big Pharma is forced to not only get out of the way of human cloning and stem cell research, but actually transform itself into the leading proponent of it. Until then, they'll fear change, they'll fear loss, and they'll do anything in their power—like shutting down a nice South Korean research scientist—to keep things status quo.

Someone asked me on New Years Eve what I was hoping for in 2006. Know what I said?

Bird flu.