I awoke one morning this month confronted with a large, red, black and white poster, clearly designed to alert me to some hysterical cause. Little did I know at that point that it was only one of 4 on my street alone; with 60 others dotted across Cork and Munster – I’ve seen them with my own eyes in Fermoy and Rathcormac. €60,000 has been spent on these posters, apparently; though whose money paid for them remains uncertain.
To evoke an immediate emotive response, the billboards prominently feature large images of foetuses in utero, despite UCC’s stem cells looking more like microscopic grey rice. They make a claim of ‘lethal research in UCC’, strong words indeed, more akin to Nazi human experiments than poking needles into lifeless goo. As the stem cells in UCC’s research are imported from abroad, this ‘lethal research’ claim is incorrect and misleading – the stem cells are gathered from situations where ‘the life/death decision has already been made’ – that is, the same criteria for cadaver research. As you can imagine, claims that medical research on donated bodies by UCC students and research partners was ‘lethal’ would be thoroughly misleading. This is, of course, exactly the purpose of the campaign.
The billboards are being funded by ‘Youth Defense’, and carry their message and website. This is a hardline religious group which promote a homophobic, sexist ideal of celibate youth, home-bound women and re-enabled criminalisaton of ’sodomy’. The often violent and always insensitive tactics of ‘Youth Defence’ are quite famous, though they have been dormant recently in deference to Cóir, who themselves have quietened after negative public reaction during the Lisbon campaign.
Other posters claim ‘73 treatments from adult cells/0 from embryonic cells’. This is, again, misleading. Embryonic cell research has only been legalised in the United States, where these figures are taken from, for 4 years, less than the length of your average PhD, and was passed as legitimate in UCC only this academic year. The majority of embryonic stem cell research done so far has been to determine their suitability for usage in treatments and acceptance by host bodies, rather than towards treatments themselves – to use another analogy, testing if a telescope would work in certain conditions, day, night and so on. The world’s first clinical trial of an embryonic stem cell-based treatment was approved by America’s FDA on January 23rd, 2009, and the early results seem positive toward curing a crippling spinal disease. In contrast, Adult stem cell research stretches back to the 90s. To mislead as such would be like saying ‘1000 stars discovered by sight/0 by telescope’ during the invention of the telescopic lens. The posters also mislead by omitting the problems with adult stem cell treatments – they are applicable very rarely and can lead to host-rejection; the manipulation of adult stem cells has also revealed that these potent cells are a large contributor to several cancers.
Regardless of this, the idea that research by an individual university should be stopped because it has so far remained fruitless is against the purpose of scientific research; as long as work is not illegal, a third-party religious group has no more right to tell the University it can not research this area than an Amish group would have to tell them not to use computers. No-one has told anyone to stop researching adult stem cells, either for the treatments they can provide or for the problems it can cause. That a religious organisation is manipulating half-truths and using accusing, misleading, emotive language towards one of Ireland’s best respected state funded institutions for the purposes of opposing a legal, potentially life saving technology should not be tolerated.
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Tags: abortion, billboards, cork, genetics, politics, research, rights, science, ucc