Randy Engel
Jackson Lab project defeated in Florida, Part II
Tom Monaghan and his "City of God" residents back the wrong horse
FacebookTwitter
By Randy Engel
May 13, 2011

The answer to the $64,000 question asked in Part I of this series on the Jackson Laboratory's controversial plans to build a large genetic research facility in the Ave Maria Stewardship Community District, that is, "Whether or not Tom Monaghan, and the residents of his 'City of God' were prepared to have a little Auschwitz in their backyard?" is "Yes, they were."

As previously noted, the 50 acre site (with more to come) was donated by Barron Collier Companies after BCC's business partner, Domino pizza king and Chancellor and CEO of Ave Maria University, Tom Monaghan agreed to the transaction following a brief phase of "due diligence."

Even after Monaghan and Barron Collier Companies learned of the anti-life and eugenic history of the Jackson Laboratory and its founder C.C. Little's dark connections to the eugenic, birth control and euthanasia movements of the 20th century they seemed to show little concern for the serious and far reaching implications of their decision to support the Jackson Lab project. Nor did the fact that the Jackson Lab was currently involved in human embryonic stem cell research and male contraceptive research move them to reconsider their free land offer to the Maine-based enterprise.

Not only did Monaghan and Barron Collier decide to stonewall the anti-life issues surrounding the Jackson Lab project, but Monaghan had the gall to sic one of his public relations toadies on this writer.

According to Father Robert Garrity, a chaplain at Ave Maria University, I was the one who was "confused" about the situation. "Jackson does not plan to do anything which is morally wrong, such as embryonic stem-cell research, at the lab being proposed for Ave Maria Town," he said. Never mind that Jackson Vice President Charles Hewett had publicly stated in April 2010 that his firm was "not willing to rule out human embryonic stem cell research." http://www.naplesnews.com/news/2010/apr/10/jackson-lab-biomedical-research-and-ave-maria-neig/ .

By early May 2010, it was clear to me that it was time once again "to praise the Lord and pass the ammunition." The second major salvo from the U.S. Coalition for Life came in the form of a detailed report on how the Jackson Laboratory was expanding its corporate financial investments to include more human embryonic stem cell research — research that involves the mass killing of the tiniest of our kin, the human embryo — research that been repeatedly condemned by the Roman Catholic Church.

What's Going on at the Jackson Laboratory West ?

Up until the U.S. Coalition for Life raised the issue, neither the officials of the Jackson Lab, nor Monaghan and the representatives of the Barron Collier Companies, nor any secular paper including the Naples Daily News had seen fit to mention the existence of JAX-West. The small facility in West Sacramento, California, was originally built in 2001 to expedite the shipment of JAX Mice and Services to West Coast universities, pharmaceutical and biotech companies and Pacific international research centers. California houses the world's largest biomedical research community.

In November 2004, California voters passed Proposition 71 which made stem cell research, predominantly, human embryonic stem cell research, a state constitutional right. Proposition 71 also authorized the creation of the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM) with a budget of $3,000,000,000 over a 10-year period.

In late 2008, Jackson Laboratory relocated and expanded its Sacramento facility with a new emphasis on developing new mouse models of human disease that can be used to test various stem cell treatments. On May 5-6, 2009, Jackson Lab celebrated the new lab's Grand Opening.

Surprise! One month later, on June 22, 2009, Jackson Labs announced that its spanking-new Sacramento facility had received a $3.4 million grant from the CIRM to develop mouse models which can support long-term transplantation with human stem cells and can be used in stem cell research. This means that human embryos are being used by Jackson Lab researchers to produce immune-deficient mouse models of human diseases that can be used for testing human stem cell therapies.

Is this why Jackson executives were so conspicuously silent about their Sacramento CIRM-funded project in their conversations with the Collier County and Florida secular and religious press?

Geneticists as Mass Murderers

Among the featured speakers at the May 2009 Sacramento JAX-West Grand Opening was Mahendra Rao, M.D., Ph.D. Although hardly a recognizable household name, Rao is famous in international biotech circles for his defense of human embryonic stem cell research. In October 2005, Rao quit his prestigious post as head of the federal NIH Institute on Aging, Stem Cell Biology Unit/Laboratory of Neurosciences, in Washington, D.C., to pursue 'unfettered' human embryonic stem cell research in the private sector at Invitrogen and the Buck Institute for Age Research.

In the Jackson Lab promotional video available at http://jaxmice.jax.org/california-facility/symposiumRao.html, Rao uses the euphemistic term "fertilized embryo" to casually describe a very young human being who is being methodically killed in the spic and span hell of a genetic laboratory in order to develop mouse HuES cell lines:

    So what was done was, you took human cells out, you know, from a fertilized embryo, you grow them on mouse feeders, you use the same combination of growth factors, and you culture them in much the same way, and you got mouse ES cell lines (emphasis added).

A fertilized embryo? You've got to be kidding. You can't fertilize an embryo. It's a non-sequitur. It appears that researchers like Rao just cannot bring themselves to admit the ugly truth — that their work involves the cold-blooded calculated killing of individual living human beings at the very earliest stages of their existence — so they hide behind artful language to anesthetize their consciences.

But they are not the only culprits on the eugenic block.

Take, for example, medical geneticists who perform BABI, the incredibly facetious acronym for Blastomere Analysis Before Implantation, the latest and most lethal prenatal diagnosis package on the market today.

The preferred method of initiating the BABI process is to use in vitro fertilization (IVF), a procedure favored by the Jackson Lab, but condemned by the Catholic Church. Following the artificially induced super-ovulation of the woman, mature eggs are collected and fertilized in test tubes in order to produce multiple human embryos. At the 8-cell stage, a single cell is excised from each human embryo and these are screened for markers indicating a gene anomaly. One, two or three of the "normal" embryos are implanted into the hormonally prepared womb of the mother. "Affected" embryos or "rejects" are destroyed. "Spare" or "orphaned" embryos are stored in frozen concentration cans or donated or sold to research labs.

According to the U.S. Public Health Service, BABI is a form of "family planning" which permits "genetically disadvantaged people" to have children free of serious birth defects without the "family nightmare" of late abortion. According to Dr. Robert G. Edwards, the father of IVF, BABI is the "preclinical abortion of blighted ova." Not known as a eugenic wallflower, Edwards says that BABI eliminates the need for both the treatment and care of handicapped children and adults. There's that Health by Death ethic at work again.

As a rule, BABI specialists will create a minimum of ten human embryos, per cycle, in order to be assured of getting one 'take home baby.' Sometimes they produce more. For example, in one celebrated case, BABI was used to produce a baby that could provide stem cells to a sibling born with Franconi's anemia. In the end, after 4 IVF cycles, the body count stood at 29 dead in order to produce the single child who would act as the donor for his affected sibling. If this is not a case of mass murder, what is?

The Institute of Personalized Medicine

This bring us to the all-important question as to what type of research, clinical studies, and "preventative" health care would be carried out at the proposed Jackson Lab's Institute of Personalized Medicine (IPM) and the satellite medical research facilities and hospitals surrounding the Institute.

According to the Jackson Lab (http://genetichealth.jax.org/personalized-medicine/what-is/benefits.html):

    Personalized medicine means that one day, doctors and genetic counselors will be able to craft a lifelong health maintenance strategy tailored to a person's unique genetic constitution. It will be possible to predict susceptibility to diseases and to prevent, delay or mitigate those diseases with precisely chosen medicines, therapies and customized lifestyle advice.

The key words here are "doctors and genetic counselors," and the prevention of diseases.

It is a well-publicized fact that the Jackson Lab was a major force in the creation in 1990, of the $3 billion, 10-year Human Genome Project of the NIH and the Department of Energy.

What is less known and appreciated by the average American is that the tax-funded Genome Project is fundamentally eugenic, both in its heart of hearts and in the clinical and public health practices that flow from it. To date, genetic tests for more than 1,200 diseases have been developed, although the frenzied search for genetic markers for the prenatal diagnosis of cystic fibrosis and autism has still evaded National Institutes of Health-funded researchers.

The first step of eugenic killing is genetic counseling, which the Jackson Lab says will be part of its IPM program. Now genetic counseling and its auxiliary medical partners, prenatal diagnosis and abortion of affected children, eviscerates the Hippocratic Oath. For, whereas, traditional medicine seeks to treat, heal, cure and console patients, the primary object of prenatal diagnosis is to seek out and destroy affected unborn patients in utero.

Logically, among the clientele seeking reproductive advice at the IPM will be "at-risk" or "high-risk" patients who wish to have a child or additional children unaffected by serious genetic or metabolic disorders. They will be advised of the availability of various prenatal diagnostic techniques including chorion villus sampling, alpha fetal protein testing, mid-trimester amniocentesis, fetoscopy, and IVF/BABI. Affected children will be destroyed. But where will the killing take place?

Probably not at the IPM, but in a specialized medical facility or hospital in the vicinity of Jackson Lab's IPM. This facility must be willing and able to carryout eugenic abortion in the first, second and even third-trimester of pregnancy.

On May 20, 2010, Michael Hyde, Vice-President for Advancement and External Relations for the Jackson Laboratory, was interviewed by members of the press at the Naples Harbor Yacht Club. One of the questions raised concerned the issue of human stem cell research. According to Hyde, nobody from Ave Maria or elsewhere had ever asked Jackson Laboratory to give its assurance that it would refrain from human embryonic stem cell research on its property. Nor, it was insinuated by Hyde, would Jackson officials and researchers likely agree to any infringement of their right to pursue whatever scientific course they desired to pursue.

All this controversy, and yet, as of June 2010, almost nothing was heard from the officials, faculty and staff of Ave Maria University including its Chancellor, Tom Monaghan, and the Ave Maria Stewardship Community District — where the Jackson Institute and its auxiliary medical facilities would be located. Nor did we hear a word of opposition from the residents of the Ave Maria Town, except for Catholic journalist and Ave Maria Town resident, Marielena Montesino de Stuart, who was faithfully chronicling events at Ave Maria.

For God' s sake — why? (To be continued.)

© Randy Engel

 

The views expressed by RenewAmerica columnists are their own and do not necessarily reflect the position of RenewAmerica or its affiliates.
(See RenewAmerica's publishing standards.)

Click to enlarge

Randy Engel

Randy Engel, one of the nation's top investigative reporters, began her journalistic career shortly after her graduation from the University of New York at Cortland, in 1961. A specialist in Vietnamese history and folklore, in 1963, she became the editor of The Vietnam Journal, the official publication of the Vietnam Refugee and Information Services, a national relief program in South Vietnam for war refugees and orphans based in Dayton, Ohio... (more)

Subscribe

Receive future articles by Randy Engel: Click here

More by this author

June 18, 2023
The life and times of Archbishop John R. Quinn & friends: A study of the West Coast homosexual network, Part IV


June 12, 2023
The life and times of Archbishop John R. Quinn & friends: A study of the West Coast homosexual network, Part III


June 9, 2023
The life and times of Archbishop John R. Quinn & friends: A study of the West Coast homosexual network, Part II


June 6, 2023
The life and times of Archbishop John R. Quinn & friends: A study of the West Coast homosexual network, Part I


February 13, 2023
A defense of Catholic sexual morality & condemnation of the Synodal Way, Part I


August 26, 2022
Bishop James T. McHugh: The forgotten man in the McCarrick equation (Part 5)


August 23, 2022
Bishop James T. McHugh: The forgotten man in the McCarrick equation (Part 4)


August 14, 2022
Bishop James T. McHugh: The forgotten man in the McCarrick equation (Part 3)


August 7, 2022
Bishop James T. McHugh: The forgotten man in the McCarrick equation (Part 2)


August 1, 2022
Bishop James T. McHugh: The forgotten man in the McCarrick equation


More articles

 

Stephen Stone
The most egregious lies Evan McMullin and the media have told about Sen. Mike Lee

Siena Hoefling
Protect the Children: Update with VIDEO

Stephen Stone
Flashback: Dems' fake claim that Trump and Utah congressional hopeful Burgess Owens want 'renewed nuclear testing' blows up when examined

Jerry Newcombe
Church should be about worship, not entertainment

Laurie Roth
Trump, the truth, and America will prevail in spite of leftist evil plans

Cliff Kincaid
Terrorist attack in Baltimore

Tom DeWeese
DOJ ignores 2nd Amendment

Linda Goudsmit
CHAPTER 11: Critical Race Theory: A species of the ideological thought genus Marxism

Pete Riehm
They have tried everything to destroy Trump, but assassination

Tom DeWeese
When your red state governor dresses in blue

Rev. Mark H. Creech
Revelation Chapter 22: Eternal recompense

Tom DeWeese
YIMBYs, workforce housing, and community land trusts: All means to an end to private property

Jerry Newcombe
The vice president visits an abortion clinic—and the people yawn?

Pete Riehm
Like our Commander-in-Chief, America is clueless, feckless, and powerless

Selwyn Duke
Did anti-white, DEI bias steal a state final spot from a white basketball team?
  More columns

Cartoons


Click for full cartoon
More cartoons

Columnists

Matt C. Abbott
Chris Adamo
Russ J. Alan
Bonnie Alba
Chuck Baldwin
Kevin J. Banet
J. Matt Barber
Fr. Tom Bartolomeo
. . .
[See more]

Sister sites