{"id":6029,"date":"2006-09-08T09:04:25","date_gmt":"2006-09-08T09:04:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2006\/09\/act-up.html"},"modified":"2006-09-08T09:04:25","modified_gmt":"2006-09-08T09:04:25","slug":"act-up","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/09\/act-up.html","title":{"rendered":"ACT up"},"content":{"rendered":"

MIchael Fumento brings all the points about the fake "no embyros were killed here, so buy our stock" incident together in one handy place:<\/a><\/p>\n

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The ACT researchers\u2019 letter left the embryos\u2019 fate ambiguous, but an accompanying figure showed a photo of a biopsied embryo at a later stage of development \u2013 one Lanza\u2019s embryos never reached. A longer Nature<\/span><\/a><\/em> press release<\/span><\/a> accompanying the article explicitly stated only one cell was removed and the embryos survived. (It has since been corrected<\/span><\/a>, and Lanza\u2019s letter will be also.) ACT\u2019s press release<\/span><\/a> declared repeatedly that the embryos survived, with CEO William Caldwell IV<\/span><\/a> celebrating \u201cOur ability to create human embryonic cell lines and therapies without harming the embryo . . . \u201d <\/p>\n

Lanza also clearly lied in an audio interview for Nature<\/em>, saying \u201cin this instance there is no harm to the embryo that we\u2019re biopsying.\u201d So did Caldwell<\/span><\/a>, telling PBS\u2019s NewsHour \u201cIn this case, we do not destroy the embryo\u201d and therefore it was \u201ca major scientific breakthrough.\u201d <\/p>\n

Lo! After steadily declining for six months, ACT stock suddenly shot up 500%<\/span><\/a> and both Lanza and Caldwell, already quite wealthy, became quite wealthier. Then just two days after the Nature<\/em> report, ACT announced<\/span><\/a> it had received commitments to raise about $13.5 million. <\/p>\n

But then along came busy-body Richard Doerflinger<\/span><\/a> of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops<\/span><\/a>. In a detailed e-mail (later posted online<\/span><\/a>), he showed step-by-step that Lanza did nothing new besides perhaps reaching new heights in scientific dishonesty. <\/p>\n

To their credit, many in the media have admitted ACT and Nature <\/em>took them for a ride had taken them for a ride. <\/p>\n

But ACT propagandist, er, uh, ethicist Ronald Green leapt to the company\u2019s defense. \u201cThe approach does not harm embryos; the experiment did,\u201d Green insisted<\/span><\/a>. (Right. And \u201cI didn\u2019t kill the victim;\u201d the shooter said, \u201cthe bullets did!\u201d) An utterly unrepentant Lanza tossed off the backlash criticism<\/span><\/a> as merely indicative of how politicized stem cell research has become. Now there\u2019s<\/em> something he knows about.<\/p>\n

Lanza has always been more salesman than scientist, constantly inveighing against the federal funding restrictions that restrict the growth of his bank account. Yet the media treat him as an impartial source on all things stem cell. Welcome to the world of ESC \u201cscience\u201d \u2013 about 10% research and 90% hype.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

MIchael Fumento brings all the points about the fake "no embyros were killed here, so buy our stock" incident together in one handy place: The ACT researchers\u2019 letter left the embryos\u2019 fate ambiguous, but an accompanying figure showed a photo of a biopsied embryo at a later stage of development \u2013 one Lanza\u2019s embryos never…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6029","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nACT up - Via Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/09\/act-up.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"ACT up - 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6029","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6029"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6029\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6029"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6029"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6029"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}