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Huge scientific breakthrough, thanks to Obama:A top congressional Republican on Sunday criticized President Barack Obama's expected decision to reverse the Bush administration's limits on embryonic stem-cell research, calling it a distraction from the country's economic slump.
Why are we going and distracting ourselves from the economy? This is job No. 1. Let's focus on what needs to be done," Rep. Eric Cantor, the Republican whip in the House of Representatives, told CNN's "State of the Union." Which is what? Try to block every effort the dems make? Screw these guys."Frankly, federal funding of embryonic stem-cell research can bring on embryo harvesting, perhaps even human cloning that occurs," Cantor said. "We don't want that. That shouldn't be done. That's wrong." These guys kill me. "We shouldn't fund this research that could help tons of people because people might do something wrong that would have to be backed by other changes in the law and probably will never happen anyway." That's basically what they're saying. Actually, what they're saying is "we're either idiots, liars, or both, and we'll do anything to make it sound like we're trying to do something useful now that we're a useless minority party with no idea how to recover politically."
Phil Plait, the Bad Astronomer, has more:With the EO, Obama will make it possible for medical researchers to have access to far more lines of stem cells, allowing them the freedom to see just how valuable these cells can be. Stem cell research is very promising in opening up our understanding of — and finding potential cures for — such diseases as Parkinson’s, Huntington’s, diabetes, and even cancer. We’re a long way from there, of course, but now researchers will get their chance to find these and other medical breakthroughs.
You can read about the stem cell controversy if you’d like — I’m sure it will come up on the talking head shows, and I’m sure many of them will be spinning like pulsars trying to make this seem bad. But while I suspect a lot of the heads will talk about the destruction of human embryos for stem cell research, they won’t mention that these embryos — really just a tiny blob of cells numbering less than 150 in total — would have been destroyed anyway, since they were created for in vitro fertilization but wound up not being needed. Yet they never seem to protest the fertilization technique itself. It’s baffling. I’ll be very curious to see what will be said about all this on the blogs and in the news. In other words, you almost never hear any complaints about in vitro, even though it destroys tons of embryos... but of course, that would require logic and critical thinking, not to mention going after an already established treatment. What these people do, it seems, is try to go after something before it's mainstream. Going after something like IVF would be politically stupid, though I'd argue going after stem cell research is, too. According to this site, By the end of 2002, nearly 300,000 babies conceived through assisted reproductive technology had been born. Considering the fact that several eggs are fertilized for each patient, that could mean that millions of embryos have either been destroyed or just plopped into a freezer after these treatments were complete, never to be seen again. Where's the outrage?
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