President Meets with Discarded Embryos


White House

W met yesterday with children who were adopted as embryos and their parents, to make the case for protecting the youngest among us. The President plans to veto a bill supporting embryonic stem cell research passed yesterday by the House.

Meanwhile, Michael Cook at Tech Central Station writes about the exaggerated hopes being raised about embryonic stem cell research.

The problem is that the sick and the scientists are rejoicing over two different visions of the future. One believes that cloning embryos will soon yield life-saving cures for devastating diseases and injuries. The other knows that this kind of cloning is basically a research tool for the foreseeable future.
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So it's important to get this straight now: cures from so-called therapeutic cloning are probably decades away. If ever.

It is also important to consider the risk that authentic scientific endeavors could suffer a credibility setback when the public becomes more aware of and disenchanted by the false hopes raised by some of the advocates of this particular line of research. I hope that can be avoided.