(msnbc.com)

The defoliants sprayed in Vietnam were harmless to humans.
I can say that unequivocally and with total assurance,
Need I point out the obvious bias of any US Liberal’s or Vietnamese Communist’s claim to the contrary ?
How can I say that with such assurance?
Because I, and thousands of other US service personnel who spent a year at Bien Hoa Air Base, South Vietnam participated in a test of exposure to the defoliants.
The test was informal but sustained exposure for our entire one year tour.
But USAF later conducted a formal investigation (see below).
When I reported in to the 3rd Wing in June, ’67 I asked someone what that strange chemical odor was?
He replied: “Oh, that’s the Ranch Hands down at the west end. They fly those C-123 defoliant missions, and you are smelling the chemicals.”
Every one of us spent our year bathed in defoliant vapor; both the orange and purple versions, because the prevailing wind was right down the single Bien Hoa runway, west to east, and the Ranch Hands occupied the westernmost location on the ramp.
When the claims of humans being damaged by the defoliant exposure arose, the USAF conducted a “longitudinal examination” of all the Bien Hoa C-123 assignees and their offspring. They concluded that there was no statistical evidence of a connection with the frequency of, e.g., birth defects, nor any other health effects among that population.
In fact, those Ranch Hand alums were on average, healthier than the general US population … reasonable when you realize they all qualified for military combat duty.
Realize that we are discussing the people who were closest to the defoliants almost 24 hrs a day, flying the planes, cleaning and re-filling the chemical tanks and scrubbing down the aircraft after each flight.
But that report has been ignored by those who want to milk our tax funds or continue the adverse propaganda that first surfaced during the Vietnam War and has been perpetuated by the Liberal Left and the Vietnamese Communists ever since.
I was once shown Vietcong propaganda leaflets they spread among the local population.
They were of two kinds.
Initially they warned the villagers of the toxicity of the defoliant; that it would make their children and cattle ill.
The result was panicked departure of the villagers from their homes, resulting in loss to the guerillas of support from the villages.
So they changed the leaflets to say that the spraying was harmless, and the stupid Americans did not know what they were doing.
Admiral Zumwalt succumbed to the propaganda, claiming that his son’s death from cancer was the result of him having once passed through an area of jungle that had been sprayed.
I believe Zumwalt even visited Vietnam after the Communists took over and apologized for our use of the defoliants.
I know that there is far too much propaganda advantage to perpetuating this big lie for it ever to be expunged, but I keep trying !

Bill Haynes

PS: Does anyone know how what I’ve written can be forwarded to MSNBC ??? Not that they would ever use it in a story, but we have to try, if possible. BH
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On May 24, 2010, at 1:31 AM, Bill McDonald wrote:

I do not know about you guys but this MSNBC liberal BS about the US taking care of the “poor” villagers allegedly affected by Agent Orange is preposterous. We sure as hell do not seem to find the North Vietnamese government making any substantial effort to take care of the former south Vietnam victims so why should we??? It is always the USA who is at fault as it seems to be with GW Bush for everything that is wrong inside this country. Sickening as the premise of this story is and I do not say that we do not deserve to work to clean up places like Danang but the villages? They certainly did not seem to be anxious to help us when our troops were in the mix. YGTBSM!! What do you guys think?? Bullet sends

Agent Orange’s catastrophic legacy still lingers
Decades after the Vietnam War, aging parents there are grappling to care for their catastrophically deformed children. Vietnam says as many as 3 million people exposed to Agent Orange have suffered illnesses caused by the chemical.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/37263424/ns/health-more_health_news/page/2/from/ET

This was written in response to a friend’s statement of opposition to a Missouri proposed law allowing therapeutic cloning.
The issue has probably become academic with the recent approval of many new stem cell lines.
However, the explanations and history cited in my e-mail are still applicable.
I recently queried Geron on why progress on application of these therapies is so slow?
I was informed that the average time required to obtain approval of a new medical procedure or drug by the  National Institute of Health is FOURTEEN YEARS !!!
My horror is caused by thinking of all the people who die while this bureaucratic, overly cautious process creeps to its conclusion.
Aside from classic Civil Service reluctance to make decisions, I believe the Thalidomide tragedy is still influencing decision making.
Here, again our media are defaulting on their responsibility to educate themselves in order to properly inform the public.

Bill Haynes

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Thanks for forwarding this to me.
You may be surprised to learn that I am in fundamental disagreement with the LC-MS statement (on the Missouri law).
Therefore I owe you, and the others to whom I’m sending this, an explanation.
First, this is another of the increasingly common issues that require more than a casual evaluation before an opinion is arrived at.
Unfortunately, most seem to accept the un-analyzed opinions of others to which they are exposed, especially if those others are considered “reliable sources”.
As I believe you know, I consider Rush Limbaugh a good source of much political information.
Well, he’s way off base in his treatment of this issue, and saying things that are just not true, such as (today) “There’s no proof, not a shred that stem cells can cure anything”.
You’ve heard me trying to get people to go to “www.geron.com“.
I try to get all my friends and acquaintances to go there and read up on what they are doing in several fields of therapeutic medicine.
That’s because I see their efforts as promising not only possible cures for cancer (all cancer ! ) but real hope that skyrocketing medical
costs will be brought down for all of us.
And, of course, being a “card carrying capitalist”, I’ve also invested my own hard earned money in their stock.
And that’s why I voted against the CA initiative that will send $3 billion to support a state research  agency that will duplicate what is already being done (see below) and funded by venture capitalist investment, including mine.
If my appraisal of their work is correct, I’d be a fool not to invest in them!
And I also hope my investment will help to hasten the possible break-throughs their work offers.
Now here’s the technical part of this message.
Both the Michael J. Fox ad and Limbaugh’s responses are incomplete and therefore misleading.
That is an increasingly dire condition in many areas of discourse these days. It places great responsibility upon all our media to exert commensurate efforts to keep us adequately informed. I think the media have failed utterly to meet that responsibility.
Geron, back in 1998 (this is what caught my attention and why I have been following them ever since). discovered the cause of the Hayflick Limit.
The Hayflick Limit was discovered back in the 1960s by Dr. Hayflick. He put human cells in a Petri dish and gave them “tender loving care”.
He found that no matter what he did, they only reproduced (underwent mitosis .. splitting into new cells) about fifty to sixty times. After that  they underwent apoptosis; that’s a fancy medical term for “they died”.
No one knew why, except that it seemed clear that the cause had to be internal to the cells.
In ’98, in an article published in “Nature”, a peer reviewed journal, Geron announced discovery of the cause.
They said that every cell expresses telomeres, and that they are essential to successful mitosis.
Telomeres are expressed at the ends of chromosomes (our genetic code) and act like the tips on our shoe laces … they keep the chromosomes from “unraveling” and properly in register, so that the messenger RNA is formed correctly and can convey the genetic information to a new, forming cell correctly.
But each time a cell reproduces, some of the telomeres are used up.
Finally, there are not enough to properly register the messenger RNA and the resulting new cell has so many errors that it is not viable.
It has encountered its Hayflick Limit.

What Geron discovered about this is seminal:

1. There’s a way to restore the telomeres and avoid the Hayflick Limit. It uses an enzyme called telomerase.
2. There’s a way to actively interfere with the process of generating and restoring the telomeres by blocking the expression of telomerase.
3. All cancer cells so far investigated express telomerase. The latter makes sense, as most cancers kill by reproducing without limit, until they choke off normal bodily functions.
4. And finally, Geron has developed a way of interfering with the telomerase, which means interfering with the ability of cancers to proliferate without limit.

They are now in Phase Two testing of the cancer killing agent. If that is successful, they will be cleared for full scale Phase Three testing of a general cancer cure!
And it will be simple and cheap, requiring a series of inoculations with the patient’s own blood, with the anti-telomerase medium added.
What has all this to do with cloning and stem cells?
Well, the same company, Geron, bought the Scottish company that cloned the sheep, Dolly, and thus acquired the world wide rights to their patent on nuclear transfer.
That’s the process that has caused all the uproar in politics in the last week.
And that is the process that makes cloning feasible.

Cloning is divided into two types:

1. Reproductive cloning, and
2. Therapeutic cloning.

The former is what produced Dolly and what is rapidly becoming a common practice in livestock breeding.
Think an entire herd of prize bulls, or record producing milch cows, or prize winning wool sheep, etc.
The process requires that the nucleus of the donor cell be substituted for the native nucleus in the fertilized ovum, so that the genetic code of the donor is directing the development of the recipient egg.
The result is a biological duplicate of the donor.
This is  no “Frankensteinian Monster”!
This is exactly what happens in the case of identical twins, where the fertilizing sperm fertilizes an egg that splits and produces two genetically identical individuals.
Therapeutic cloning is different in its function and does not produce a cloned individual.
Geron has perfected a method of producing stem cells that have received the nucleus of a cell from the person to be treated by the eventual form of the cells.
That means that whatever the patient receives that’s based upon the stem cells used, will be biologically identical with the recipient patient.
To properly appreciate the significance of this you have to know that Geron has successfully produced:

• Beating heart cells.
• Islet cells that are being tested now as a possible total cure (not a palliative nor a temporary intervention) for diabetes.
• Nerve cells that when inserted into the spinal column of crippled mice, restored most of the motor activity to previously crippled hind legs.

Geron is presently beginning initial human testing to see whether similar results can be achieved with human spinal column or other nerve damage sufferers.
Now here is where the cheese gets binding.
The cells that Geron has altered were fetal stem cells, and in order to be successful when inserted into human patients, they should have had the recipient’s DNA inserted via a nuclear transfer from the recipient’s body just before the stem cells first began to split.
That’s “therapeutic cloning”.
It produces replacement cells (and some day, it is firmly believed, whole organs that are biologically identical to the recipient) that can be inserted in the patient and will nor be rejected as foreign material and will not require anti rejection drugs for the rest of the patient’s life as with normal transfers.
The problem that arises and is being fought out in this political battle, boils down to one issue:
Is creating stem cells for therapeutic purposes a violation of the  “right to life” of that tiny, microscopic entity that (though it will never be) could theoretically become the basis for a new human being?
This bi-passes the issue of human reproductive cloning that has essentially no support by any persons nor organizations in the US, at least for the foreseeable future.
(Which is NOT to say that there will be no human reproductive cloning anywhere … it is a big world and enough money can make it happen, I will say will make it happen, somewhere in the near future)
That is even though there have been many successful reproductive clonings of favorite pets, and as I’ve said, prize livestock.
My view on the use of zygotes (a more correct and far less emotionally charged term than “embryo” … look them up) is as follows:
The zygote will be used to, hopefully, cure very serious and debilitating disease in a living human being, improving their quality and probably duration of life.
If not so used, the zygote would have been disposed of as of no use. (Especially when the source is extra zygotes produced in a fertility clinic to aid a childless couple in having a child)
The zygote will have been “sacrificed” to produce a greater good.
I liken this to a young person who (as in the case of over 90 just this month in Iraq) loses their life fighting for our country in combat, or as a fire fighter, policeman, etc.
The fundamental difference is that the zygote, having no capacity for thought nor volition, cannot be consulted on its willingness to volunteer for a task that can cause it to be killed.
Well, in my mind that cuts both ways.
Not being a thinking human, nor having any chance of ever becoming such, causes the viability of the zygote to be balanced against the welfare of one who is a thinking human being.
In that contest I come down for the sufferer who can be cured.
Of the two outcomes, a suffering human or a zygote that will otherwise be flushed down a clinic drain, I come down on the side of the human being.

Hello Sue:

Have you noticed that the Dems have directed closure of the Yucca Mountain Nuclear Disposal site, and right after that Pres. Obama announced in his State of the Union speech that he will advocate new nuclear power plant construction?
I’ve seen no awareness of the utter illogic of this anywhere.
We have tons of nuke waste languishing in metal barrels stored in “swimming pools” all over our country, and now they want to build more nuke power plants while shutting down the only safe storage site?
These people make “illogical” a totally inadequate adjective!

Bill Haynes

PS: I’m well aware that Yucca Mountain is the proverbial “third rail” of Nevada politics. But the ridiculous concern that we must build a facility that people ten thousand years from now will be able to decipher the purpose of and will be safe until all the radioactivity expires is truly laughable.
I find it akin to the people of New York City about 1900 … they had horse manure piling up in the streets, while sides of beef were hanging in front of butcher shops on the roadsides.
The flies would eat lunch in the manure piles, and for desert, land on the sides of beef.
The Yucca Mountain hysteria is like those New Yorkers worrying about us, in the 21st Century, being overwhelmed with flies.BH

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Friends,

This week, Harry Reid claimed that Nevada’s economy is facing “robust growth.” Nevada’s unemployment stands at 13 percent, a nearly 300 percent increase since Harry Reid became Senate Majority Leader, and underemployment is at approximately 20 percent. We also have record home foreclosures, personal and business bankruptcies.

So Harry Reid sure picked an interesting week to pat himself on the back. Only a career politician in Washington can claim to be “second to none” in his advocacy for our leading economic industry — tourism — on a week of alarming headlines of job losses, bankruptcies and sharply-declining revenues. I find his desperate claims about our economy’s so-called “robust growth” to be startling, and, quite frankly, embarrassing.

Through all the political grandstanding and slick ads, Harry Reid’s reckless, ineffective and bankrupting policies are making matters worse for all Nevadans. Threats of yet higher taxes and trillions of dollars of more debt for our kids and grandkids cost Harry Reid his political career. Worse than that, it will cost all Nevada families for generations to come. We cannot afford Harry Reid six more months — let alone six more years.

Sue Lowden

PS: Follow this link for out-of-touch Harry’s week in review, including news of Reid single handily killing a bi-partisan jobs bill.