The Third Way
I love stories like this.
As we know, the debate over embryonic stem cell research has foundered on the usual rocks of religious objections to technological progress. In this case, the scuttling factor was the especially toxic connection to fetuses (embryos, actually), which plays into the Far Right’s fanatical agenda to control female sexuality. Once again, it seemed, the now-living would have to take their place in the moral pecking order below the not-yet-born as opponents successfully prevailed on Scientist-in-Chief George W. Bush, known for his erudition in medical ethics, to ban federal funding for all but a ridiculously inadequate number of existing stem cell lines.
Fortunately, it appears that a way out of this zero-sum game may have been found – by more science! A number of publications are reporting that researchers may have discovered a way to create stem cells with similar beneficial characteristics to those made from embryos, but rather than using material taken from “destroyed pre-born infants,” these are made using regular old skin cells.
Researchers caution that:
“The method we have presented is not a replacement for embryonic stem cells… The advantages these offer are purely scientific ones."
Specifically, creating such cells in large numbers, a much easier task without the added step of using hard-to-manipulate and difficult-to-acquire donor eggs, will allow experimentation on the chemical signals that cause the resetting of adult cells. Explaining this resetting, or reprogramming, is a goal of scientists who hope to use this research to create transplant tissues.
Interestingly, this breakthrough (if it pans out) is being greeted most warmly by members of the American Taliban like Senator Sam Brownback (troglodyte, Kansas), because it offers them a brightly-lit path out of the Valley of Political Doom that their opposition to embryonic stem cell research had led them into. Leave it to those white-coated atheists to pull the fundies’ nuts out of the fire.
Needless to say, the manifest benefits of scientific progress not only in solving material problems, but in evading the occasional ethical dilemma, will not diminish the enthusiasm for Brownback and the Dark Age Gang to promote the teaching of myth and conjecture in the science classroom. One wonders how much progress would have been made on an issue like this if researchers, faced with a particularly complex issue, had simply thrown up their hands and concluded that “God must have designed it that way.”
9:41:21 AM 
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