A company called NeoStem will be announcing a joint project with the Vatican on Tuesday to promote research in adult stem cell therapy.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s not often that the Vatican gets directly involved with a company listed on the New York Stock Exchange, and while the Catholic Church is not making a financial commitment in the deal, it is a kind of \u201cVatican Seal of Approval.\u201d<\/p>\n
The charitable arm of the biopharmeceutical company, the Stem for Life Foundation, will be working together with the Vatican\u2019s Pontifical Council for Culture to try to show the promise of adult stem cell research in treating disease.<\/p>\n
The Catholic Church has long opposed research on embryonic stem cells, arguing that such work means destroying life.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere are terrible ethical and moral problems with the use of embryonic stem cells,\u201d said Fr. John Zuhlsdorf of the Catholic Online Forum. \u201cTo use them you have to kill an embryo. This is not a problem with adult stem cells.\u201d<\/p>\n
Fr. Robert Gahl, professor of ethics at the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross, said the Vatican should be congratulated for working with NeoStem.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is an ethical approach to discovering new cures for thousands of diseases, even including degenerative conditions,\u201d Gahl told FoxNews.com. \u201cTens of thousands of patients have already been successfully treated and the further promise of this research is truly exciting.\u201d<\/p>\n
Fr. Thomas Berg of the Westchester Institute, a Catholic think tank, said the initiative is an example of a Vatican department thinking out of the box \u2013 at least by Vatican standards \u2013 and trying to engage the world of biotechnology.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think we should all welcome this announcement as a sign that the Church is indeed trying to engage that culture in a positive way,\u201d Berg told Fox.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A company called NeoStem will be announcing a joint project with the Vatican on Tuesday to promote research in adult stem cell therapy. It\u2019s not often that the Vatican gets directly involved with a company listed on the New York Stock Exchange, and while the Catholic Church is not making a financial commitment in the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4491,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-577593","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/577593","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4491"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=577593"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/577593\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=577593"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=577593"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=577593"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}