Links of the Week
Because the moral high road wasn’t high enough, Rove bolstered the White House’s case against federal stem cell research by lying. Well, maybe “lying†is a bit harsh. I mean when you just make shit up, then your reality is quite clear. So here’s Rove telling it like it is (except to the rest of the world that has a fact-based reality.)
When White House political adviser Karl Rove signaled last week that President Bush planned to veto the stem cell bill being considered by the Senate, the reasons he gave went beyond the president’s moral qualms with research on human embryos.
In fact, Rove waded into deeply contentious scientific territory, telling the Denver Post’s editorial board that researchers have found “far more promise from adult stem cells than from embryonic stem cells.”….
But Rove’s negative appraisal of embryonic stem cell research–echoed by many opponents of funding for such research–is inaccurate, according to most stem cell research scientists, including a dozen contacted for this story.
The field of stem cell medicine is too young and unproven to make such judgments, experts say. Many of those researchers either specialize in adult stem cells or share Bush’s moral reservations about embryonic stem cells.
“[Rove’s] statement is just not true,” said Dr. Michael Clarke, associate director of the stem cell institute at Stanford University, who in 2003 published the first study showing how adult stem cells replenish themselves.
If opponents of embryonic stem cell research object on moral grounds, “I’m willing to live with that,” Clarke said, though he disagrees. But, he said, “I’m not willing to live with statements that are misleading.”
Dr. Markus Grompe, director of the stem cell center at the Oregon Health and Science University, is a Catholic who objects to research involving the destruction of embryos and is seeking alternative ways of making stem cells. But Grompe said there is “no factual basis to compare the promise” of adult stem cells and cells taken from embryos.
Grompe said, “I think it’s a problem when [opponents of embryonic research] make a scientific argument as opposed to stating the real reason they are opposed–which is [that] it’s a moral, ethical problem.”
