Medical researchers increasingly fear domestic terrorism in Planned Parenthood attack

Rss@dailykos.com (joan Mccarter) · Friday, August 14, 2015, 7:08 pm
.
Fetal tissue research has been a staple of medical progress since the 1930s, including back in the 1950s in the development of the polio vaccine, as well as vaccines for diseases like chicken pox, rubella, and shingles. That's the part of the highly edited, deceptive "sting" videos attacking Planned Parenthood that's not getting a whole lot of media attention. But the backlash against the organization—with fetal tissue research at its center—has not gone unnoticed by the scientists. Having witnessed the reign of terror anti-abortion extremists have unleashed on the medical provider community, they're terrified they'll be the next targets.
.
Over the past week, BuzzFeed News has written to more than 70 scientists who have received federal funding — ranging from around $50,000 to nearly $5 million — for research that involves human fetal tissue. They work on a diverse range of projects: understanding human blindness, developing vaccines, making better models of HIV, and creating therapies for liver failure, just to name a few. Most of these scientists have run their own labs for years, if not decades, and would normally be happy to talk to the press.
.
But just six agreed to talk about their use of fetal cells, and only under the condition of anonymity.
.
“What a chilling effect, you know?” one stem cell biologist working at a large public university told BuzzFeed News.
.
She requested to be anonymous for two reasons. “There’s crazy people out there and I have young children,” she said, adding that, so far, she has not received any specific threats. […]
.
Another scientist agreed to be on the record, then changed his mind two hours later, after talking to someone from his institution’s communications office.
.
Yet another researcher panicked because he didn’t get an email confirmation that BuzzFeed News wouldn’t use his name. Given the “toxic environment” to abortion in the U.S., he explained in a follow-up message, “[W]e scientists fantasize various kinds of horrible worst-case scenarios that could derail our research and family life.”
.
There's very good reason, apart from the murder of abortion doctors. Research clinics, too, have been the targets of bomb threats. The companies working with researchers to get the tissue aren't immune from threat, either. StemExpress, one of the companies targeted in the videos is losing contracts and one of its leader's home address was posted online, along with a message that she "should be strangled with a piano wire."
.
That's what terrorism does. That's what every elected Republican and every Republican candidate to be elected is bolstering: an environment of terror. That's institutional fear that they will become the target of either political or physical attacks and very real fear on the part of individual researchers for their safety. Because they are conducting perfectly legal and very important medical research that could save even more lives.
.
http://feeds.dailykos.com/~r/dailykos/index/~3/So_qSqCx-yA/-Medical-researchers-increasingly-fear-domestic-terrorism-in-Planned-Parenthood-attack