IYOKIAR: first thing I thought when I saw this on TPM.

The blind Hypocrisy really knows no bounds...just none.

I came to say what AFinch @1 did. Their hypocrisy truly has no limits. I'm just sad that Colbert and Stewart are no longer around to explain this to the masses. (Don't ever leave us, Dan and Kos!)

Youthful indiscretion.

IYOKIAR? (I did a search .)

@5:

All fetal tissue is by-definition dead.

@8 Except for the tissue in live fetuses.

He's a Republican and a hypocrite. What's the problem?

@9 so is the fetal tissue grown in bottle culture

As someone who's harvested the tissues of fetuses for research (cattle and sheep), I can tell you that Dr. Ben Carson is a medical miracle: a walking, talking pile of shit.

First, neither he nor any other fetal-tissue-using researcher killed any babies. By definition. Second, if he was truly working with "dead" specimens, then his results were all fabricated and he needs to retract his publication.

You see, when a fetus is removed from the womb and circulation ceases, individual cells in many parts of this complex assemblage keep right on doing the same things their own individual DNA tells them to do, sometimes for many hours or even days, especially if cooled. Those things include taking in nutrients, expelling waste products, synthesizing and breaking down complex molecules, and even dividing to form additional cells. Some types of cells, like neurons, go haywire very quickly because of their high energy requirements. Others putter along happily for quite some time.

"Death" is not an instant but a process—a creeping pall of dysfunction that gradually overtakes the whole. But in the meantime, many tissues (kidney, lung, choroid plexus, skin fibroblasts, etc.) can be sliced and diced, digested with enzymes, washed, and put into nutrient medium in culture flasks where the individual cells carry on in Flatland rather than a three-dimensional organism. That's the point where they become the actual subject of research, as a homogenized product kept under controlled conditions.

If I understand his logic correctly:

It's ok to make things from ivory.

It's not ok to obtain ivory.