Imagine that you find that a loved one - a child or a spouse - has a chronic renal (or liver) problem due to the toxins and hight fat and sugar foods that governments and commercial enterprises in your country have allowed to proliferate everywhere, or due to some infection or genetic deficiency. You know not to blame any gods - because there aren't any to blame, and being a loving rationalist parent, you don't waste your time and your child's/spouses by praying or going to a healing service. You seek out the best medical science with the conviction that there may well be a good solution available, and if not now, then soon. Upon making extensive enquiries you are told by one brave research doctor that not only has there been significant successful US research into growing functioning organs such as kidneys in test tubes, but that researchers in Japan have grown healthy kidneys inside rats using stem cell techniques and have succeeded in repairing damaged kidneys in rats by injecting somatic cells. In response to your understandable query about why there are no human cures yet available, she relates that the problems are complex - but that researchers are overcoming them rapidly and surprising even scientists with their success. You ask what the problem is. She declines to answer, but bites her lip, sighs and wishes you the best of luck. The look she gives you at first makes you think that there is no hope, but she approaches you later in the car park and mentions that it is not the technology that is not progressing, but certain people's attitudes, and that she didn't want to say anything for fear of her career getting torpedoed.

You make an enquiry with whichever national government sanctioned Kidney health organisation is responsible for monitoring and controlling funding to treatment research and find that they are not very forthcoming with information about the stem cell and genetics based successes, and tend to talk them down a lot. You scratch your head (just like the research scientists are) wondering why this is the case and then you have an epiphany. They are a government audited and sanctioned organisation, with government controlled funds and government administration, and are as such - well - government managed. Whilst research scientists have to be the most brilliant and intellectually rigorous bods in their fields - politicians can be any ignorant fool that looks good in a suit or can talk a lot of whammy - and usually are. Governments are of course full of anti-scientistic panic merchants and politicians and administrators who are controlled by - or who are themselves - god-bothering religionist obstructionists 'hell'-bent on stopping your family from seeing the benefits of this research that allows researchers to grow kidneys in the laboratory by cloning. On their off days these giggling religious obstructionists go along and listen to some faith healer insult people's intelligence and just basically insult them by promising that some imaginary friend is maybe going to heal them and really wants to heal them but if it don't work out then - oh well - mustn't have been the will of the imaginary friend. By the standard 80-20 ratio rule of idiots and mouthpieces to genuine humanistic rational problem solvers in administrative and government organisations, you realise that the better elements are not going to have much of a chance without some serious help. So you start/join this group and muck in with at least some moral support, and possibly some great ideas for how to prevent ignorant obstructionists preventing everyone from receiving a true scientifically delivered miracle sooner rather than later.

Test tube kidneys created

New hope for kidney patients

Fighting for the Right to Clone

Advanced Cell Technology’s Studies to Support Phase I Multicenter Trial of Patients with Stargardt’s Macular Dystrophy Demonstrate Excellent Safety Profile

Stem Cells Without Embryo Loss: Religionists and Theists Still Opposed

"THE POLITICS of EMBRYO STEM CELL RESEARCH

January 2001 British Houses of Commons and Lords bans human reproductive cloning but votes in favour of wide-ranging research on stem cells, including creation of cloned embryos for therapeutic cloning.

August 2001 US House of Representatives bans all government-funded human cloning research, including creation of a cloned human embryo for therapeutic purposes.

September 2001 Australian House of Representatives committee recommends a ban on human reproductive cloning but votes in favour of wide-ranging research on stem cells, although with a three-year moratorium on the creation of cloned human embryos for therapeutic use. " (source: http://www.abc.net.au/science/slab/stemcells/default.htm)

Of course, the medical profession is, unfortunately, not free of the ravages of religious idiocy