Stem Cells

If you're a microscopic embryo left over from someone's fertility treatment, then last week was a good week, said The Philadelphia Inquirer in an editorial. Yes, you're still frozen in a laboratory and, yes, you're still due to be destroyed. But thanks to President Bush, you can at least rest easy that you won't be used in medical experiments that are funded by federal tax dollars. For actual living human beings, on the other hand, especially those trapped in wheelchairs or dying of brain diseases, it wasn't such a good week. For the second time in a year, Bush vetoed a bill that would have eased restrictions on scientists wanting to use versatile 'œstem' cells from these doomed embryos to develop new treatments. The public supports such research, but Bush doesn't care, choosing instead to 'œenshrine in law what is essentially a religious belief: That all stages of human life are sacred. Hands off.'

That black-and-white way of looking at this issue is no longer valid, said Yuval Levin in National Review Online. Since 2001, when Bush limited federal funding to research on stem-cell lines that had already been created, scientists have discovered several stem-cell sources that don't require the destruction of a human life. Indeed, Bush accompanied last week's veto with an executive order to increase support for research on these new 'œethically uncontroversial' techniques, which create stem cells out of cells harvested from placentas and adults. In the long run, science may be able to steer around the great moral dilemma of the past few years and still pursue the promise of stem-cell therapies.

Jeff Jacoby

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