What has been entirely missed amidst the bickering is that Bush’s executive order did more than what is implied in the article. The ban on federal funds meant that no ESC research outside that on several flawed lines could be done in labs or using any equipment that was funded or partially funded by federal dollars. The effect of this was that most universities and other research had to build new facilities and buy new equipment in order to do this research. This made it prohibitively expensive and stifled the research. That was the goal and that was the effect. To state otherwise is either ignorant or disingenuous.
Adult stem cells and cord blood do not provide fully pluripotent cells. Many of the cells being referred to are more appropriately called progenitor cells. They are already partially specialized and so cannot be triggered to become a cell outside of that partial specialization. We do not have a full array of progenitor cells and progenitor cells cannot answer some of the fundamental questions about true stem cells (ESCs).
A look through the articles and comments gives no compelling answer to the question posed earlier; why is it better to throw left over IVF embryos into the garbage than to allow those cells to be used for potentially life saving research?
