As the Governor’s campaign seeks to distract the public from the ethical failings of his pay to play administration, they will probably focus on the few issues they hope will pull undecided voters into their fold. As their flagrant State Election Board manipulation demonstrates, Jim Doyle has a win at any cost mentality and that means playing to the fears of the sick and elderly with promises of false hope.
Stem cells a political wedge issue: Lois Anderson, a "card-carrying, lifelong" Republican from Madison, isn't sure who to vote for this November in the race for governor. The reason: stem cells. Anderson would normally support Republican candidate Mark Green, whose opposition to much embryonic stem-cell research is shared by her Christian Reformed church. But the 79-year-old woman's husband has Parkinson's disease, for which stem cells could become a cure. Democratic Gov. Jim Doyle favors the research, pioneered at UW-Madison eight years ago.
James Thomson's views on research: The political process and the press have so hyped expectations that people expect to see these therapies in the next couple years. (That's) not going to happen. When anything brand new like this wants to enter the clinics, it takes a long time. I can't remember exactly how long it takes for, say, the drug industry to go from discovering a drug to getting it into clinics. But it's like 20 years; it's not a year or two. That's for a well-proven kind of therapy, a small molecule. For cell-based therapies, people should anticipate that they will ultimately work. But there's going to be a long, hard series of events that have to occur before we get them to work.
If you think about diabetes, you live a long, productive life with Type I diabetes. Nonetheless, at the end of your life, there's fairly significant complications and your life expectancy is much reduced, even with the best therapy today. Nonetheless, if you introduced a cancer to a person, so that they got pancreatic cancer, that kills you pretty quickly. You want to be really, really sure that the thing you introduce doesn't create a worse condition than what you're trying to cure. In the case of diabetes, I believe this will be ultimately successful. But there'll be an awful lot of safety testing required before this actually gets into patients.
