Stanford using beating aborted-baby hearts on campus for research
In riveting testimony for the defense, Dr. Deisher, who holds a Ph.D. in Molecular and Cellular Physiology from Stanford University School of Medicine, told the court that to be harvested for research, a baby’s heart “has to be beating and be arrested in a relaxed position by perfusing it with a potassium solution.… To be useful for research, the heart requires energy to relax after contracting, and if it runs out of energy, it is useless for research.”
To clarify, the attorney for the defense asked Deisher, “The fetal heart would have to be alive when dissected from the fetus?” Deisher responded affirmatively saying that “it has to be beating.” The study protocol — which was approved by the Stanford University Institutional Review Board — describes the way in which “human fetal hearts provided by StemExpress, Diamond Springs, California, were perfused using a Langendorff apparatus using Tyrode...