

The metaphorical ink had no sooner dried on last week’s skin cell-to-stem cell breakthrough than President Bush and his supporters took credit for it.

Echoing a celebratory White House press release, Bush policy adviser Karl Zinsmeister told the New York Times that "This is very much in accord with the president’s vision from the get-go…. I don’t think there’s any doubt that the president’s drawing of lines on cloning and embryo use was a positive factor in making this come to fruition.”

The message reverberated through conservative circles and reached a fever pitch in the National Review Online, where the Discovery Institute’s Wesley Smith wrote:

So thank you for your courageous leadership, Mr. President. Because of your willingness to absorb the brickbats of the Science Establishment, the Media Elite, and weak-kneed Republican and Democratic politicians alike — we now have the very real potential of developing thriving and robust stem-cell medicine and scientific research sectors that will bridge, rather than exacerbate, our moral differences over the importance and meaning of human life.

Now, there’s nothing wrong with being excited at the prospect of embryonic stem cell (ESC) equivalents that don’t require embryos to be destroyed. And it’s probably true that — thanks to Bush’s decision to ban federally funded research on all but a handful of early ESC lines, and his subsequent vetos of stem cell research bills — a few would-be ESC

scientists ended up looking at alternatives.

But as Marcy Darnovsky, associate director for the Center for Genetics and Society and a longtime ESC research critic, told me last week,

"Cloning-based stem cell research has not proceeded the way it would have if it hadn’t been tangled up in the culture wars."

Darnovsky thinks that all the controversy led scientists and a politically infuriated public to overhype embryonic stem cells and downplay the alternatives. Take away the culture wars, take away the fight for dwindling federal money, take away the necessity of convincing states to fund research on their own, and embryonic stem cells would have been one alternative among many — promising, but not dominant. So-called ethical alternatives might actually have progressed faster and been better-received, as they wouldn’t have fallen by default onto one side of a vicious ethical battle.

That itself is a controversial position. But leaving it aside, Yamanaka and Yu’s wondrous skin cell-to-stem cell transformations would not have been possible without techniques and developmental insights generated by the very same embryonic stem cell research that Bush condemns.

Embryonic and non-embryonic pluripotent stem cell research didn’t take place on parallel paths; it was intellectually interdependent.

As for whether Bush or anyone else should pat themselves on the back,

Arlen Specter (R-Pennsylvania) told the New York Times, “I really don’t think anybody ought to take credit in light of the six-year delay we’ve had…. My own view is that science ought to be unfettered and that every possible alternative ought to be explored.”

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