The Color of Stem Cells
By Josef Tayag,
The Greenlining Institute
| 09. 09. 2005
Why the benefits of stem cell research might not be for people like me.
After losing half of one of my lungs to tuberculosis while
volunteering in the Andes last year, I assumed that life would
just never be the same again. By this I meant that the flight
of stairs to my apartment would always seem twice as long and
that I would have to give up things I enjoyed like taking long
runs on Sunday mornings.
However, the promise of therapeutic treatments derived from
stem cell research gives individuals like me a hope for normalcy.
Yet, as an immigrant from a low-income family, I can’t
stop from cringing at the thought that the low-income and marginalized
communities of the state still have no explicit guarantee of
access to the promised 'cures' of Prop. 71—much less to
adequate health care in general.
Last Friday, the Independent Citizen’s Oversight Committee
(ICOC) allocated a little over $39 million to prestigious research
institutions like UCLA, UC Berkeley, Stanford, USC, and Cal
Tech among others. Yet, it’s unclear from perusing through
many of their grant proposals just how much focus these research
institutions will give to communities...
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