Bravo! Thank You, Mr. President!

As he had promised, today President Bush vetoed the embryonic stem cell funding bill passed by the Congress and Senate.

In his written statement to the House as he returned the vetoed bill, he said, "If we are to find the right ways to advance ethical medical research, we also must be willing when necessary to reject the wrong ways. For that reason, I must veto this bill."

President Bush could not be more correct with this statement. Science and nature have insurmountable barriers that cannot be violated (e.g., the Three Laws of Thermodynamics, the speed of light). Ethics and morality have barriers that are just as real but are not insurmountable. But just because something can be done does not mean that it must be done, or even that it should be done. Even surmountable barriers often should not be crossed.

In the early part of the 20th Century, the US Supreme Court upheld a law (since struck down) allowing states to sterilize, without the consent of the patient or their family, the mentally retarded to prevent the contamination of the gene pool. Eugenics of this type was considered scientifically rational at that time; today we consider this repugnant -- because we now know better the ethical and moral swamp that that idea leads to.

President Bush later went on to say, "This bill would support the taking of innocent human life in the hope of finding medical benefits for others. It crosses a moral boundary that our decent society needs to respect."

Let me rephrase this in the form of an analogy. Let's say Congress passed a bill providing funding for the use of the bodies and tissues of executed criminals for medical research "in the hope of finding medical benefits for others". I suspect the outrage would be immediate and highly vitriolic.

The only real difference in the two proposals is that the criminals could actually volunteer for this honor, whereas the embryonic humans cannot. And, of course, the criminals are convicted criminals, whereas the embryonic humans are guilty only of being created and unwanted.

The US House of Representatives has already tried to overturn this veto and has failed.

Let no one fail to realize this: the issue of government funding (with the tacit governmental approval that this implies) of embryonic stem cell research has nothing to do with science or treating disease or helping people.

Embryonic stem cell research to date has shown little scientific promise, with limited to no actual benefits ever having been shown and a significant (greater than 50%) incidence of malignant teratoma formation when it has been tried as a therapy. Somatic (umbilical cord or adult, usually bone marrow) stem cell research, on the other hand, which is not barred from federal funding, has shown some encouraging results in early trials, and does not seem to have any significant risk of teratoma formation.

If there was significant promise for treating disease from embryonic stem cell therapies, rest assured the biotech companies would be funneling large amounts of research dollars into doing this research (private funding for embryonic stem stell research is not banned). As it is, the biotech firms are voting with their dollars -- they are not funding embryonic stem cell research. That alone should be telling.

The promotion against all evidence of usefulness of embryonic stem cell research, and particularly the strident demand for federal funding and thus tacit federal approval, has only one motivation. It is the cry of the anti-life crowd (aka pro-"choice") for a stamp of imprimatur for abortion. How such approval leads to any kind of justification of abortion follows an illogical argument that cannot be understood by any truly sentient being, but it is there nonetheless.

Polls suggest that 70% of the American public supports the idea of federal funding of stem cell research. I'll wager that the majority of this 70% does not understand that stem cell research does not have to be embryonic stem cell research. Furthermore, I'll wager that if informed of the fact that the most promising stem cell research is not embryonic, they would insist that the research funding go into somatic stem cell research.

So thank you, Mr. President. Ethics and morals and science are on your side.


P.S. Senator Frist, you are a physician. I cannot believe you do not understand this.