We have a link to attorney Wesley Smith's bioethics website on the right side of our weblog. Here is his excellent short essay from the Weekly Standard on the Obama two step regarding dissecting living human embryos.
That opaque notice tells us absolutely nothing. But a little research makes clear why the administration was so terse: The 2007 executive order required the government to make a point of funding what are known as "alternative methods" for obtaining pluripotent stem cells. These are procedures that don't require the destruction of embryos to derive these powerful cells, which are theoretically able to become any tissue in the body. It is this capacity that scientists say makes embryonic stem cells so valuable.
And indeed, the big news in biotechnology in 2007-08--proving the wisdom of the Bush policy--was the development of a technique known as "cell reprogramming," in which ordinary human skin and other cells are transformed into "induced pluripotent stem cells" (IPSC). This achievement and subsequent advances in research were deemed so impressive and important that the journal Science named the development of the IPSC as the scientific "breakthrough of the year" for 2008.
What makes Obama's stealth action so maddening is that he claimed to support "groundbreaking work to convert ordinary human cells into ones that resemble embryonic stem cells" in his stem-cell speech. But what he did was eradicate the very executive order that guaranteed that such science would be federally funded--an order that as far as I know nobody was lobbying to revoke.
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I can think of only two reasons for this unwarranted revocation: vindictiveness against all things "Bush" or considered by the left to be "pro-life"; or a desire to get the public to view unborn human life as morally akin to a crop ripe for the harvest so as to open the door to funding destructive embryo and human cloning research--actions advocated, not coincidentally, by the New York Times in the immediate wake of Obama's stem-cell executive order.
Wait, there's a third potential reason: both of the above.
President Obama's silent revocation of alternative-methods funding as a special project of the federal government betrayed the concerted attempts made over the last eight years to find a common way forward in one of the most ethically contentious areas of biotechnological research. So much for bridging the country's cultural and political divides.
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