Stacie Pyre, in the Stem Cell Therapy Review Journal, tells of Katie Piper who was partially blinded by an acid attack:
Katie was an aspiring young model in March 2008, when her spurned ex-boyfriend Daniel Lynch, 35, arranged for Stefan Sylvestre, 22, to throw sulfuric acid in her face.
The acid, some of which Piper had swallowed, blinded her in her left eye, and caused partial thickness and full thickness burns. “It spread through my body like fire. I felt as if I was being burned alive, that I was melting like a candle,” she writes in her memoir Beautiful.
Ms. Piper has undergone over 100 operations to reconstruct her face. In addition, she has undergone stem cell therapy on her left eye to repair her vision.
“Now I can clearly see silhouettes, I can see movement, depth. If I was looking at somebody’s face, I’d be able to see, the features in their face. But I can’t quite read the eye chart or anything like that yet,” she says.
This success was not achieved with embryonic stem cells – those taken from human beings killed in the early embryonic stage of development – but with cornea stem cells taken from an adult donor.
For the surgery, Doctors at the Queen Victoria hospital harvested stem cells from eye tissue taken from the cornea of an anonymous male donor. They then grew the cells in a lab, and three weeks later, placed these on a membrane, which they stitched into Katie’s damaged eye.
Dr. Sheraz Daya, the surgeon who led the team, says he’s successfully treated more than 60 patients with the procedure.
That’s great news and a beautiful story. Ms. Piper saw improvement with ethical treatment, not by killing innocent human beings.
But sadly this success story doesn’t fit with Ms. Pyre’s agenda. She ends her Journal piece by attempting to confuse readers with several paragraphs discussing embryonic stem cell research even though that research had no part in Ms. Piper’s recovered sight. Disgraceful. Ms. Pyre should be embarrassed.
United Kingdom Channel 4 broadcast Ms. Piper’s story a couple of weeks ago on July 23, 2013. That broadcast shows the same bias. The broadcast spends only six seconds mentioning the fact that the cells that actually helped Ms. Piper came from an adult donor while spending over two minutes dwelling on stem cells from killing embryos that had no part in her healing. Ms. Piper can’t just celebrate the success of her own operation using ethical stem cells, she has to dehumanize nascent human beings and push for killing them.
