The Heated Stem Cell Debate is Coming to a Close
The same guy, James Thomson of University of Wisconsin-Madison who started the embryonic stem cell debate effectively ended it when he and Shinya Yamanaka of Japan announced that you can match cells from human skin, without using embryos.
A moral debate has collapsed under the weight of scientific progress. Says the New York Times:
Now with the new technique, which involves adding just four genes to ordinary adult skin cells, it will not be long, he says, before the stem cell wars are a distant memory. “A decade from now, this will be just a funny historical footnote,” Dr. Thomson said in the interview.
Stem cells made big news in the early 2000’s when President Bush came out hard against them, agreeing with a lot of Americans but being blasted by the left wing who couldn’t figure out why he won re-election in 2004. Now, Bush’s historical position on stem cells has turned out to “vindicate” him, according to Charles Krauthammer:
Even a scientist who cares not a whit about the morality of embryo destruction will adopt this technique because it is so simple and powerful. The embryonic stem cell debate is over.
Which allows a bit of reflection on the storm that has raged ever since the August 2001 announcement of President Bush’s stem cell policy. The verdict is clear: Rarely has a president — so vilified for a moral stance — been so thoroughly vindicated.
There might be a lot of reasons (try three trillion of them) to not like Bush, but his stance on stem cells made him look like Nostradamus. Good leaders have standards and then get people to live up to them.
Remember, back in ‘01, liberals were saying Bush’s stance on stem cells was idiocy. Back then, proposing adult stem cells as a possibility for an alternative was like saying we can run all of our cars on ethanol. In this case, however, technology and ethics won out.
JFK had landing a man on the moon before 1970 an example of what leadership can do plant thought-seeds in peoples’ minds. Ronald Reagan had “evil empire” and “tear down this wall.” Bush, so far, has non-embryonic stem cells.
Krauthammer:
That Holy Grail has now been achieved. Largely because of the genius of Thomson and Yamanaka. And also because of the astonishing good fortune that nature requires only four injected genes to turn an ordinary adult skin cell into a magical stem cell that can become bone or brain or heart or liver.
But for one more reason as well. Because the moral disquiet that James Thomson always felt — and that George Bush forced the country to confront — helped lead him and others to find some ethically neutral way to produce stem cells. Providence then saw to it that the technique be so elegant and beautiful that scientific reasons alone will now incline even the most willful researchers to leave the human embryo alone.
The wall has been torn down. Now, let’s heal some people!
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