Stem-cell breakthrough: Was Bush right?

“The embryonic stem-cell debate is over,” said Charles Krauthammer in The Washington Post. Now that two scientists, James Thomson and Shinya Yamanaka, have found “the Holy Grail” by turning normal skin cells into ultra-versatile “stem” cells, we no longer have to create and kill human embryos for this critical medical research. But in the media’s praise for the genius of these two scientists, something is missing: An apology to President Bush. Ever since Bush took a moral stand against the use of human embryos in stem-cell research in 2001, he’s been vilified by liberals and scientists, who’ve charged that his “dogmatic religiosity” was standing in the way of possible treatments for Alzheimer’s, diabetes, spinal-cord injuries, and other dread diseases. Now Bush has been thoroughly vindicated. “If human embryonic stem-cell research does not make you at least a little bit uncomfortable,” the scientist Thomson admitted after his breakthrough was announced, “you have not thought about it enough.”

Giving Bush the credit for the scientists’ work is just a little “far-fetched,” said The New York Times in an editorial. When the president banned federal funding for stem-cell work that involved human embryos, he made such a mess of the field that he drove talented American scientists away. It’s no accident that “the primary discoverer of the new techniques” was Yamanaka, who did his work in Japan, where he wasn’t “subject to the president’s restrictions.” In fact, said Ellen Goodman in The Boston Globe, Thomson and other scientists are saying that Bush set the entire field back by “four or five years.” To figure out how to create stem cells without embryonic stem cells, scientists had to experiment on embryonic stem cells. And since the new technique—which has worked only in mouse cells—is unproved, scientists say human embryonic stem-cell research should continue.

So no, the stem-cell wars aren’t over, said Michael Kinsley in Time. I’m 56 and suffering from Parkinson’s, and by setting back stem-cell research for years, Bush may have cost me and millions of other Americans a chance at effective treatments in our lifetimes. All the hoopla notwithstanding, it’ll be years before we’ll know if the new technique will yield “anything that can be of practical value to me and others.” So Bush is no moral hero to me. Given a choice between a “clump of a few dozen cells floating in a petri dish” and millions of suffering human beings, Bush—and most of his fellow Republicans—chose the cells. We won’t forget it.

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