Where is this "ample proof that stem cell research is widely supported in the scientific community?" Hopefully, publications are more cautious about claims now, than when highly thought of scientific magazines, published as great research, the falsified evidence of South Korea's Hwang Woo-suk. The title of a true scientific result reported is: "Embryonic Stem Cells Injected into The Mouse Knee Joint Form Teratomas (Tumors) and Subsequently Destroy the Joint," Journal of Rheumatology, 2003. And Nature Biotechnology Dec. 2003, reported that just about all human embryonic stem cell lines, as they develop, spontaneously accumulate extra abnormal genes.
Only a year ago, caution was advised by Lancet, a prestigious British medical journal. Lancet noted that scientists, supportive of embryonic stem cell research, discussing their research at a recent meeting in London, had found that, "no safe and effective stem cell therapy will be widely available for at least a decade, and possibly longer."
For the ones needing help soon and likely to be helped, adult stem cell treatments should be tried. The Bush administration does fund adult stem cell research, the research that can help now.
Any citizen who wishes to donate to private embryonic stem cell research can do so. The Bill Gates Foundation - to which Warren Buffett added more money - the Rockefeller Foundation or the Ford Foundation could easily fund this research.
Mary Giovanoni
Hagerstown
Bay must be protected
To the editor:
Every blade of cut grass, every ounce of fertilizer-laden dry dirt/oozey mud that makes its way down the streets and alleys into storm drains and eventually into the Potomac and into the Chesapeake Bay carries with it the death weapon for the Potomac - the source of drinking water for many millions - and for the Chesapeake which was described as "Nestle's Quick" after the recent deluge.
Runoff is not only destroying the largest estuary in our nation, it is eliminating with deadly prejudice the rockfish, the oysters and the famous soft- and hard-shelled Maryland blue crabs.
It's killing the grasses, the feeder fish and the ways of life for thousands who have lived on and made a living off those waters and their once teeming life.
This letter is to thank Lee Epstein of the Chesapeake Bay Foundation for his almost single-handed, dedicated, and unceasing campaign to stop the mindless, the lazy, the self-involved and the greedy whose cavalier behavior is behind so much of the destruction of these wondrous gifts of God's creation.
It's also an apology for firing off my "howitzers" so broadly in my latest campaign to save my homeland that Epstein took much of the blast. I am sorry.
And I still owe you one for your help with that battle, despite my attack hitting you, too.
Mary Haines
Hagerstown
We're not in it for oil
To the editor:
There is a guy named Josh Rales running for the U.S. Senate in Maryland. His pitch is that we are in Iraq to seize Iraqi oil for ourselves. He wants us to get out immediately. Not a word about Islamic terrorists whom we are fighting in Iraq, Afghanistan and other places around the world.
Why do we really fight? It isn't for anyone's oil. It's because these Islamists very explicitly state that their goal is to destroy all non Islamic infidels -us in particular - who do not subscribe to their radical beliefs. In truth, we are fighting for our very lives. And that is a darned good reason not just to fight but to win, whatever it takes!
If this guy thinks that seizing Iraqi oil is our purpose, he must be out of touch with reality and not someone to be a senator!
Donald R. Currier
Smithsburg
