By Kathleen Gilbert
IRVINE, California, April 22, 2010 (LifeSiteNews.com) – The leader of the Center for Bio-Ethical Reform clashed with a prominent embryonic stem cell researcher after the group displayed the researcher's portrait alongside Nazi scientists who experimented on Jews, and images of aborted children, on his home campus.
Jill Stanek reported Thursday that Dr. Hans Keirstead, co-director of the Sue and Bill Gross Stem Cell Research Center, fumed at CBR's Gregg Cunningham over the display erected at his own University of California, Irvine. CBR visits college campuses across America with its Genocide Awareness Project, a large display featuring images of aborted children which compares the abortion massacre to the Nazi Holocaust and other genocides.
Keirstead, a world-renowned researcher and professor of anatomy and neurobiology at UC Irvine, is heading up a human trial involving injecting embryonic stem cells into patients with spinal cord injuries.
For all his anger over the Nazi comparison, reports Cunningham, “Keirstead's main arguments were exactly the ones used by the Nazi doctors who were doing lethal experiments on Jews”: “Their victims were subhuman, they were destined to die anyway, it was all legal, other countries were doing it and it would benefit all mankind to find cures for dread diseases.”
“He was standing in front of a sign with the covers of the books quoting those exact arguments and the irony was totally lost on him. He just stood there parroting propaganda like a programmed robot,” said Cunningham.
When Keirstead referred to embryonic children as “fertilized eggs,” Cunningham said he replied that “he was doing what racists do when they dehumanize blacks with the 'N' word or anti-Semites when they use the 'K' word to slur their Jewish victims. The fertilized egg reference wasn't even the biologically correct term for embryos at the stage at which he is killing them.”
Cunningham says he also had a retort for Keirstead's anger that aborted children at later periods of gestation were shown next to his picture: “He said he worked only with 'blastocysts' and not fetuses. I told him I was a lawyer and invited him to sue me. We said that ages of his victims were irrelevant to his culpability for killing them.”
The use of stem cells from aborted children has met with failure in past experiments, typically resulting in tumors and other complications. Meanwhile, adult stem cells have been credited with the treatment or cure of numerous ailments ranging from spinal cord injury, to Alzheimer's, to type I diabetes.
See related LifeSiteNews.com coverage:
Fetal Stem Cell Injections Create Brain Tumors in Israeli Boy
https://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2009/feb/09022003.html
Calif. Quietly Shifts Fruitless Embryo Research Funds to Adult Stem Cells
https://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2010/jan/10012908.html