Stem Cells
I just had a debate with my father about stem cells. His position is that Bush has done more for stem cell research than any president in history. My position is that what he has done is put restrictions that hinder progress, in a way we are both right.
Bush is the first President to offer any federal funding for stem cells, good for him, he did so in this speech. The reason, I think, he was the first is because it was only during his presidency that the issue came to a head, it is unfair to say that Clinton, or Bush Sr., or Reagan did not do their parts because quite frankly they did not really have the opportunity to do so, previously stem cell research did not include embryonic stem cells but rather Adult stem cells, it is only when it was discovered that embryonic stem cells hold the greatest potential that it was determined that the research would be greatly benefited by federal funding. So Bush compromised by allowing federal funding to be used for 60 embryonic stem cell lines that already existed. That sounds good until you stop to consider that in fact only 19 of those lines are available to researchers and of those that are available most contain bits of mouse feeder cells which greatly decrease there potential value for humans. What that means is that if you are a researcher who was not lucky enough to have one of those few strains before 2001 you are out of luck because you can’t get one now, and that means that instead of 100% of the people working on the problem that could be, instead there is only a small fraction them doing so, and usually in the case of science the more brain power involved the better the chance of achieving results. So why not lift the restriction and allow new stem cell lines, thousands of embryonic stem cells that would be perfectly good to use are thrown out every day by fertility clinics, I guess the problem is that the president and his supporters think it is more respectful of the potential life to throw it in the trash than it is to use it to potentially save lives.
Kerry would have lifted the restrictions on federal funding to include new lines, thus expanding the potential for positive advancement by creating more opportunities to succeed. And as to the argument that the reason you can’t use new stems cell lines being that they come from a mass of cells that could become a human at one point and therefore that it is the same as murder to destroy stem cells I find to be highly offensive.
That some conservative Christians, and our president, believe that it is the same moral situation to destroy a mass of cells as it is to kill a living breathing, thinking, conscious human being, I think, is absurd; no wonder they talk so much about devaluing life, they are already experts at it.