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LA Weekly has published Michael Hoinsky Hoinski’s wonderful retrospective of of Ken Kesey’s adventures in Los Angeles, on this, the 40th anniversary of the first acid test, including this quote from long-time Kesey collaborator, Rev. Paul Sawyer:

“Their [Kesey and the Merry Pranksters] goal and interest was really making life not just fun, but good in the deepest moral sense. There’s a deep morality to it—to make heaven on Earth, as they say, and to be quite deep at that. Not at all just some playing around. And playing around was part of it. Not to be so highly serious but to have a deep purpose. I think that’s underrated around Kesey’s situation, and I don’t think it comes through in Tom Wolfe’s book [The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test]. He intimates that that’s what they were reaching for, but you don’t have the sense that they touch it.”

Coincidentally, or not, Barlow has news of youngest daughter Amelia’s recent skiing accident. She’s going to be okay, but it was close.

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We’ve collectively assumed that the only way to harvest embryonic stem cells was through aborted human tissue or embryonic material (yeah, yeah I’m fully aware of the loaded terminology and I chose the words carefully). Turns out that assumption may be wrong; maybe we can grow them from a single harvested cell.

Wired News is reporting that researchers at Chicago-based Reproductive Genetics Institute believe they can extract a single cell—a blastomere—from an eight-celled organism called a morula and subsequently grow more embryonic stem cells from the harvested seed cell. Taking a single cell from a morula doesn’t harm it and there’s evidence that the embryonic stem cells produced from the balstomere are more powerful than cells harvested from organisms even a week older.

There are proposed techniques that side-step the moral controversy of destroying tissue that surrounds embryonic stem cell research, including the use of dead embryos from fertilization clinics (problem: there’s no way to tell if an embryo is dead) and using cloning technology to create an organism that has no potential to become a human being (problem: too blatant an attempt to end-run the moral issue).

Some believe California’s US$3 billion Stem Cell Research and Cures Initiative research fund makes all of this a waste of time and resoures. “The California funding decision has made the deliberation of the bioethics committee somewhere between irrelevant and unimportant,” Arthur Kaplan, director of Penn’s Center for Bioethics, told Wired News.

For the rest of us, hope springs eternal.

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This morning’s New York Times has a well-done overview of the history of organ transplantation, while avoiding most of the ethical issues involved. In the span of five decades, surgeons have learned how to transplant virtually every organ in the human body. It’s amazing and more than a little frightening. And not just to the antivivisectionists.

The main problem related to organ transplantation has always been, and remains, rejection of the transplanted organ. The body perceives a transplanted organ as a foreign substance and sets about to get rid of it as quickly as possible. As a result, immunosuppressive drugs are required to artificially lower the immune system in order to prevent organ rejection. This, of course, brings on its own set of nasty problems. A human doesn’t stay well for long without a healthy immune system. The medical community discovered, quite accidentally, that they had been overprescribing immunosuppressants for years. Current leading edge research in the area of mixed chimerism—tolerance of the transplanted organ without immunosuppressive drugs—shows some promise, but at this point it’s still trial-and-error, with a small error resulting in a devastating rejection. The risks associated with long-term use of immunosuppressive drugs remains largely unknown.

Another serious problem with organ transplantation is chronic rejection. Nearly half of all cadaveric donor organs wear out and the medical community has so far failed to understand this phenomenon.

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Nothing is more indicative of the U.S. healthcare system being off the rails than expecting uninsured patients to pay significantly more for hospitalization than those with private insurance. Such is the case throughout the country and highlighted in the case of Advocate, a Chicago-area non-profit healthcare organization sponsored by the Evangelical Lutheran Church and United Church of Christ. According to Jonathan Cohn’s New York Times Magazine piece last Sunday:

“When the Service Employees International Union, which is trying to organize Advocate workers, analyzed Advocate’s billing in 2001, it found that uninsured patients were being asked to pay 140 percent more than those with private insurance.”

How did non-profit healthcare get to this point? During the late 1800s and early 1900s a veritable boom occurred when churches established hospitals to provide healthcare for America’s burgeoning urban immigrant population, most of which was destitute. While the hospital building boom eased off, hospitals associated with religious orders continued to serve the urban poor through the 1970s by way of a system that could only be called a skim. “Every time a health insurer, whether private or a government provider like Medicare, wrote a check to a hospital for a medical service,” writes Cohn, “it was in effect paying more than the actual cost of that service; hospitals could then use the extra money to finance care for those people who had no way to pay.” By the 1980s healthcare costs began to spiral out of control and the federal government reduced the amount Medicare would pay to these hospitals. In the 1990s healthcare costs broke out of the spiral and soared on a breathtakingly near-vertical trajectory and the federal government put Medicare on a perilous race to the bottom at a nearly as breathtaking path in the other direction.

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