Elizabeth Blackburn Quotes
We're involved in a very large study that's federally funded and being done with Kaiser Permanente, and saliva is a very non-invasive way to get cells from the body.
Dreifus, Claudia. "A Conversation With Elizabeth Blackburn: A Matter of Aging." The New York Times, 18 Feb. 2013, p. D2.
Volk was also a Physician, Attorney & Economist. This complaint was first expressed in the Congress by Volk, but has been heard in every era since then.
The Tuskegee Experiment was a low point in medical research ethics in American history. Black men who had contracted syphilis, were experimented with and not given treatment even after penicillin was developed, while they have never given their consent or in most cases even told they had the disease. Not only did many of them die, but 40 women contracted syphilis from the men who had never been told that they had the disease. The “experiment” was run by the United States Public Health Service.
When couples use in vitro fertilization to have children, they usually produce several fertilized embryos one of which is implanted into the womb of the mother. The other embryos can produce stem cells which are cells that can grow into any other kind of cell—brain cells, bone, cells, kidney cells, stc. Therefore they have the most promise for medical research. However, some people regard the embryos as human beings at an early stage of development and see the embryos as life. For them the notion of using that “life” for medical research where a human being will not be produced but instead a medicine or replacement cells for a sick person crosses a moral line of what is proper for a life form. Others observe that the embryos are kept alive in freezers and will be thrown away if not needed so why not use them to help mankind. At the other extreme some are opposed to allowing in vitro fertilization to begin with, but there have been over a million people born with this technique to couples who otherwise would not have been able to have children.
Stem cells are cells of the body that transform into all other cells as needed. Embryonic stem cells are the ones most easily transformed to create other needed cells. There was and is a large supply of embryonic stem cells but religious abortion opponents were concerned that if there were enough success there would be a market for fetal stem cells which would encourage some women to have abortions so that they could sell the embryonic stem cells. President Bush, to placate his religious right wing, had banned federal funds being used for fetal stem cell research. President Obama, who had campaigned on this issue and been elected, then overturned the ban with this quote.
The Institute was just getting started then. The stock market had crashed the year before, and we were one year into the Great Depression. Several of the trustees that that they should devote the first department of the institute to the study of economics to focus on the challenge of the depression. Flexner, the first Director, thought that a bad idea giving this quotation as his reason. He then persuaded the trustees to start with mathematics where the Institute has since done its finest work.
Elizabeth Helen Blackburn, AC FRS FAA FRSN is an Australian-American Nobel laureate who is the former President of the Salk Institute for Biological Studies. Previously she was a biological researcher at the University of California, San Francisco, who studied the telomere, a structure at the end of chromosomes that protects the chromosome. In 1984, Blackburn co-discovered telomerase, the enzyme that replenishes the telomere, with Carol W. Greider. For this work, she was awarded the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, sharing it with Greider and Jack W. Szostak, becoming the first Australian woman Nobel laureate. She also worked in medical ethics, and was controversially dismissed from the Bush Administration's President's Council on Bioethics.
