A Lie Gets Halfway Round the World

Before the truth even laces up its boots...

Future of Stem Cell Tests May Hang on Defining Embryo Harm

With the active encouragement of the Bush administration, U.S. scientists in the past year have developed several methods for creating embryonic stem cells without having to destroy human embryos.
But some who now wish to test their alternatively derived cells have found themselves stymied by an unexpected barrier: President Bush's stem cell policy.

The truth is that no scientist in the country has been unable to perform research due to Bush's stem cell policy. What they have been unable to do is to get Federal Funding for their work. They are still allowed by law to do the research, but the big bad gov't won't fork out money to them anymore. A fact that the article mentions in passing, but briefly, so as not to stop ripping Bush apart for his "anti-scientific attitudes".

The question is whether stem cells made this way are as versatile as those harvested from destroyed embryos. And what about stem cells created by other means, such as those of Anthony Atala, the Wake Forest University scientist who in January announced he had isolated embryonic stem cell equivalents from amniotic fluid?

Well, let's hope not, as embryonic stem cells have brought us naught but decades of failure. The much heralded "versatility" of embryonic stem cells is a complete myth. They have made nothing but tumors, while the adult stem cells that real scientists use have cured dozens of the very diseases that the politically driven part of the science community promises us that ESC will evenutally provide, 20 years or more in the future.

And now for the whopper:

Sean Tipton, president of the Coalition for the Advancement of Medical Research, a stem cell research advocacy group, said the policy amounts to a Catch-22.
"On the one hand, they're saying, 'Find this out,' " Tipton said, referring to the Bush administration's repeated call for scientists to find ways to make and study stem cells without destroying embryos. "On the other hand, they're saying, 'You're not allowed to do the research to answer these questions.' "

As I originally noted in my article Please Ignore the Man Behind the Embryonic Stem Cell Initiatives Curtain, this debate has absolutely ZERO to do with science. This debate rests wholly on the responsibility to fund research that not only has given us nothing for decades, but has no promise of ever giving us anything.
No scientist has been impacted in any way by Bush's federal order. ESC is state funded in Missouri and California, and maybe a couple of other states. Harvard is doing research on it. These scientists are just crying that they can't fund their lackluster research that, on it's face, seems to have as little potential as the rest of the ESC field. If their research even seemed promising, they'd get private funding. The government is the last resort for failed science that produces nothing, so that the scientists involved can suck at the government teet, and not have to work at producing new ideas.