Isn's it ironic how everytime religion vs science arises, those who back religion always revert to considering science as "observational" and having no merit or proof. Yet , what is religion ? science has proof , religion has 2,000 year old bibles that get a makeover everytime science makes a breakthrough

One should consider the fact that morality (morals) is but opinion and not certainty. Scriptural writings, of any ilk, that deal with moral issues, or imply them, are opinions; perhaps valuable in themselves and, even, desirable, and socially beneficial. However, even if there is a majority of humnans who favor an opinion, there is no evidence that it is any more than opinion. So, in this respect one should appraise the value to society as a whole in order to evaluate whether one opinion over another will satisfy the demands of life in this biosphere, and not be an impediment to progress within it.  

After reading the comments it seems clear that most people do not understand the difference between morals and ethics.  Technically there might not be "morals" in "pure science" but there are definitely well-defined ethics in most scientific fields, including my own of plant genetics. The notion that something (or someone) is less valuable or informative because they lacks morals (or lacks your morals) is ignorant, holier-than-thought rhetoric meant to scare people.  I thought when we elected Obama that we were going to put fear behind us and face the future, as uncertain and dismal as it may seem right now, with courage, resolve and perhaps a little enthusiasm?  

This notion of Bush having a "war on science" is absurd!  It was formulated, marketed, and introduced into the culture by the pro-embryonic stem cell group…this is nothing more than a marketing campaign by an anti-Bush special interest group.  Hanson/Gore then thrust it into the mainstream to help their snake-oil “Man Made Global Warming” ponzy-scheme.  

You talk about a war on science?  Why is every global warming skeptic intimidated and blackballed??? If the science is that clear (which it’s not) why stifle scientific debate?  A lot of the stuff the Bush administration rightfully questioned from NOAA ended up being bogus anyway.  Remember the now discredited “hockey stick theory”, which was supposedly the smoking gun?  Now it’s just one more headstone in the cemetery of bad science and scare-tactics that the lefty crowd is using to hurt our economy and enact the Gore ponzy scheme.  10 years from now, instead of ocean levels rising ten feet, Al Gore’s name will go down in history with Ken Lay and Bernie Maddof’s!

Science is showing a cooling planet for the last ten years even with CO2 levels rising. But apparently Obama is going forward with his cap and trade political agenda. So nice to talk out of both sides of his mouth.

Cheers for yet another amazing step in the right direction from the new President. The sooner we can remove any trace of the failed Republican ideals from our government/science/education/economy/environment/etc., the better.

Excellent articel Alan!  Too bad so many fools of faith are here spewing their nonsense.  I am glad that we have a president who is going to put real science back into the White House and our country after 8 years of being blinded by religion.

Real Science Rules!

I hope Obama doesn't overcompensate the Bush problems. This article has an interesting take by Yuval Levin:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/03/09/AR2009030902233.html?hpid=opinionsbox1

"The issue, [Obama] suggested, is a matter of science, not politics.... By this logic, an increasing proportion of public concerns must be kept beyond the reach of democracy and be handed over to scientists or other experts to manage."

Good point!

Dear Alan,

Once again a great job all round.  Anyone who doesn't realize there was a campaign to discourage true scientific research in favor of right wing Christian ideology under the Bush administration is obviously part of the ideological problem.

I love to read your blog and then wait to see how many nuts fall out of the trees.  It is both amusing
and frightening to see how much ignorance and superstition remains in humanity in the 21st Century.

Keep up the good work.

Most people in this country, and indeed world, do not understand the rigorous logic involved in creating a theory from a hypothesis and the difference between causality and association.  There is an association with higher temperatures and increased atmospheric carbon dioxide, but can it be shown that increased carbon dioxide causes increased temperatures?  I assert that claim cannot be proven with the evidence we currently have; it is possible that higher temperatures on the planet cause increased atmospheric carbon dioxide from possible sources such as melting permafrost, outgassing from oceans, lakes, rivers, etc.  As temperatures on the planet have increased, so have atmospheric concentrations of other gasses such as nitrogen oxides.  This claim can be checked by looking at the Lake Vostok ice cores from Antarctica which data back thousands of years before the start of the industrial ages.  Also, from looking at this ice core data as well as the geological record, we can clearly see global temperature and climate changes (ice ages and eras where the temperature is higher than it currently is) occuring before human life has existed at all.  If natural phenomena have caused these swings in climate in the past, who can prove that these same forces are not currently at work today?  Certainly, I do not claim that global warming is anthropogenic or not as absolute fact, but there is a lot of solid evidence on both sides that needs to be carefully weighed in the ongoing debate before we, as a society, decide which policies to enact.

"Evan Willimantic, CT... All life is God's we haven't the right to interfere. We were merely appointed as care takers. Destroying His creation is something that we will all have to answer for. Only God has the right and power to take life."

Remember to tell the doctors that if you ever need a blood transfusion, cancer therapy (yes cancer lives too), or anti-biotic..oh and if you need a new heart someday or some organ donation from some poor young sod who got nailed walking across the street, don't let 'em....also the next time you kill all those un-used sperm cells, go pray for forgivness.

Now, back to the real world...there is no doubt using human fetuses for stem cells is unfortunate and causes moral dissonance. But the fact remains, these fetuses are destined to die anyway , so like the accident victim destined to die, and offers their organs to let another live, this whole stem cell issue is a no-brainer...get those cells !

[ALAN ADDS: Just wanted to make clear that the process of extracting stem cells can involve the destruction of a blastocyst, comprising maybe 100 cells - but not a fetus, which is a stage of development that begins maybe eight weeks after fertilization. The stem cells are taken from the blastocyst at about the five-day stage of embryonic development. The use of fetal tissue is an important but separate level of debate.]

Hey, dead aborted babies for sale.  We'll fund you if you want to study dead aborted babies, in the hope that you will find a cure for Michael Fox.  Well, there goes some more billions for this "sound science".  It's a joke and it only keeps the abortion mills running.  

he is a good person

The party of death strikes again. All Heil Fuhrer Obama!!

Obama said during today's signing ceremony. "It is about ensuring that scientific data is never distorted or concealed to serve a political agenda - and that we make scientific decisions based on facts, not ideology."

Does anybody notice that Obama characterizes those who oppose his agenda as having a political or ideological agenda when the very initiatives that he proposes are wrapped in political and ideological assumptions and presuppositions?

What a hypocrite. Does this fool think that people will not catch on?

Apparently Obama does not know the difference between scientific progress and ethical considerations.  

Science is what this world needs now more than ever. With the population raising we need science to help provide food for us. With the earth warming we need science to help us with all our man made problems.

God has nothing to do with all that we as humans have done to ourselves and the world. it is our job to heal the earth and the human race. Not a magical being that lives in the sky. Maybe if we all wait around and do nothing but talk to the sky maybe everything will fix its self.

im sure Zeus will fix the sky’s that we polluted. Neptune will heal the oceans and restock all of our fish that we have killed off and everything will be magical again.

Wake up people.

Thank you Obama for funding science once again and putting it where it belongs, at the for front of this country and the world!

Please spew on, hate-filled ignoramuses, and continue your complete disregard for reality.

When Bushco began their campaign to destroy America 8 years ago, there was much talk about irony being dead.

Irony is obviously not dead, as evidenced by the crackpot comments seething with self-righteous indignation and hatred. It's just invisible to the rapidly decreasing numbers of True Believers. They can only crank up the volume of their rhetoric spewing to make up for the increasing lack of interest by the general public in their failed ideas.

The ignorance of the right wingers is truely scary. "We have no right to destory life"? (Then don't destory harmful bacteria.) These embryos were NEVER going to be humans anyway. So you'd deny cures to disease to push your agenda. Even Nancy Reagan is on board with the research. Goerge Bush stood for "dignity"? He stood for ignorance. These are the same peole who believe in fairy tales like "Adam & Eve". Truely amazing.

Will this signal the end of the war on scientists who dare ascribe to intelligent design?  They are the one who have paid the worst price for years. Loss of jobs, loss of tenure, publishing rights taken away. I doubt their fate will be changed as those repressive of the intelligent design camp are fully in the lead now.

Joe From 'Seattle Politics is NOT our collective moral voice in a democracy.'  Politics is the application of money and power to get what one wants.

Anti-science fanatics always claim that they're not really opposed to science and that they "love" or at least "like" science.  The problem is that despite their angry protestations, they don't actually understand it very well.

Agnotology: The cultural production of ignorance.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agnotology


I first read about it in an interview in the January 2009 issue of "DISCOVER" magazine, pages 12-14.
Proctor interview with Discover magazine:
http://discovermagazine.com/2009/jan/08-why-did-western-drs-promote-tobacco/?searchterm=proctor


Robert N. Proctor bio at Stanford:
http://www.stanford.edu/dept/HPS/proctor.html

All of your comments are interesting but what you all don't understand is there has been a war on science since 2002.  Funding for NIH (National Institutes of Health) where most funding for research comes from has been held to 2002 levels by the Bush Admin. Hence alot of research has been put on hold that doesn't have any thing to do with stem cells. In the stimulus package just passed there was a provision for 10 billion dollars for science.  Folks he is funding research again not just stem cell research. So for those of you that think he is immoral for allowing stem cell research to continue with human embryos, I raise my hat to the man who decieded that research and science are important to this country and the world.  

About 150 years ago, during the first study of gases, it was found that some gases acts as a barrier to certain frequencies of radiation.

During the past 150 years, we have created sufficient of these gases to raise the amount in the earth's atmosphere by 50%.

The applicable laws of physics have been tested repeatedly and always been found correct.

Next Problem:
 You cannot engage in a process with any aspect of the infinite, in a finite world.  Capitalism is a doomed and dooming economic philosophy.

Problem:
    The Human Race is not smart enough to manage a planet.

I have to say that there has been an ideological war on science by the Republicans because the results that the scientists were coming up with were fitting in with the ideology of the right and be pro-business.  

For those that believe life begins at conception, I challege you to view pictures of different mammal embryos and chose the human one.  I am not saying that we are equal to animals, but what I am saying is that I don't believe that life begins at conception and will be damn hard to prove.

I guess if the economy is a swamp the president can keep his boots clean on the high ground of science.  This puts an elegant spin on an administration that is dazed and confused by the challenges they haven't understood or addressed.

Finally, the crazy christians will not be able to stop the world from progressing. I find it funny that they love science that destroys life (weapons) but hate science that saves or creates life.

Doug Fingles Says: "Deciding to destroy a human being to help other human beings is an unethical decision that cannot be supported."

I read this and think you must be against any war and the death penalty, because that's exactly what both do. Out of curiousity am I correct, or will you squirm out of that with some moral flexibility that allows you to kill (Have killed) those that don't agree with you?

I am sick and tired of the constant Bush bashing; especially over environmental issues.  Bush was right not to sign the Kyoto accords.  The sad fact is that the Kyoto accords have absolutely no chance of preventing, or slowing, global warming because they contain 2 fundamental flaws:
1. China, the world's second largest polluter would only sign the accords if they were listed as a developing nation.  In practice that means that China has to do precisely 0 to clean up its act, and can even expect help from the West to modernize its economy.  That also means that if you own a dirty factory in the United Sates, you probably have older equipment, and are already on the fence about moving to China.  If extra costs are added to your business, to penalize you for emitting green house gasses, you will probably pack up your equipment and move it to China.  Thus all that has been accomplished is to move the pollution to another country, and displace American workers in the process.
2:  The Kyoto accords trading system are based on acid rain.  The only way to eliminate it is to eliminate the sources.  Thus the Kyoto accords focus on the elimination of greenhouse gas emissions.  There is nothing in them to protect, or expand, green house gas sinks, such as the Amazon, or old growth forests.  To put it simply; if the human race emits 250 units of green house gases, and the planet's ability to absorb those gases is 200 units a year; nothing will be gained if we lower our emissions to 150 units a year while simultaneously reducing the planet's ability to absorb those gases to 100 units per year.

Bill Clinton had the opportunity to sign the accords, and didn't.  He left it to Bush.  I believe that he was aware of these problems, and left it to Bush to take the blame for them.  Bush showed courage by not singing a treaty; despite the wide spread support for it.

I also believe that Bush banned stem cell research out of personal beliefs.  I didn't agree with that decision, but I understand that it came from his personal convictions.

Let's use this money to fund a lunar colony. I'd volunteer, even if it was for a position doing hard labor for the rest of my life. As long as I can get off this planet before it's destroyed by religion, science, or worse scientology.

There are copious quantities of stem cells available without destroying embryos in the umbilical cord of newborn babies.  That shouldn't offend anyone.  Some doctors offer storage for future use.

"It is about letting scientists like those here today do their jobs, free from manipulation or coercion, and listening to what they tell us, even when it’s inconvenient - especially when it’s inconvenient. It is about ensuring that scientific data is never distorted or concealed to serve a political agenda - and that we make scientific decisions based on facts, not ideology."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B1-bX2SmU-c&feature=related

There's hope yet!

Rrding Doug Fingles:

"Deciding to destroy a human being to help other human beings is an unethical decision that cannot be supported."

This is a gross generalization, and I truly hope you don't believe this fully. For if you did you could not kill the intruder that just broke into your home and is attacking your family. There one example that refutes your statement. Are there others? Sure there are.

As far as the artifical standard you mentioned, does that also apply to reasons for pushing a nation (any nation) into war for:
1) links to terrorism (nope didn't fly)
2) weapons of mass destruction (nope not there)
3) human dignity (ahh focus groups approve. We'll run on that.)

I, for one, support the War on Terrorism, when it was about fighting terrorism and not settling old debts by old politicans who saw it as their only shot to 'get back in there'.

Back to the current topic - scientific inquiry.
There was a period of time in history known as the Dark Ages when scientific inquiry was essentially stopped and 700+ years of human potential and progress were lost due to political motivations and irrational spiritually backed policies. You can add 8 more to that figure thanks to policies of the Bush Administration.

Perhaps now, we can focus on what science is telling us about our world rather than how that science can be molded (or outright ignored) to fit the political, economic, and ideological leanings of those who just want to make more money for themselves and their business contacts.

We'll see how it plays out.

Way to go Mr. President!  WOOHOOO!

The Bush era politics of demonizing science, specifically any science that got in the way of the neocon / bigot agenda, is finally coming to an end!  

Thank goodness!

The whole point of conducting science is to gain a better understanding of our environment, to better ourselves, to make better/smarter decisions.  It is the macro level of “Don’t touch the stove, it is hot and will burn you.”  Anyone apposed to science is dooming themselves (or worse, others like their offspring) to ignorance.  The Dark Ages are named that because there was no scientific advancement.  The next time you need to visit the hospital, thank a scientist for the treatment.  The person who made that plastic tube, the electronic monitoring equipment, or the tiny needle that doesn’t hurt as much, or the chemicals to sterilize the rooms and the drugs which cure disease or at least relieve some of the pain or the disciplined doctor who stayed up late reading books about the human body for 8 years of their life.  Study and understanding leads to original thought and enlightenment.  Bush (who is passive) would have everyone chanting and prying the sky won’t fall.  Obama (who is proactive) is allowing for a government which helps its citizens… even the ones who refuse to contribute.  What is more human than that?!

I have always struggled with what the moral dilemma is with embryonic stem cell research.  As I understand it, almost all embryonic stem cells are acquired from fertility clinics.  Fertility treatment, and in-vitro fertilization in particular, are incredibly expensive procedures.  In order to provide the greatest opportunity for success and reduce the chance of repeating an expensive procedure, once the egg is fertilized, and cells have multiplied a few times, the embryo is split (essentially the same process that creates twins), providing multiple embryos.  These are then allowed to grow for a time.  Some of these multiple embryos die naturally, and some survive.  Of the survivors, a few are implanted in the womb (again more than one to increase the chance for a successful pregnancy).  The dilemma lies in what to do with the other surviving embryos, if all were implanted every time, you would end up in the situation that the women in California has found herself in.  Some are donated (assuming the mother meets a strict set of prerequisites), some are frozen for possible future pregnancies (again at a higher cost that can be prohibitive), and for the last eight years, the rest are destroyed and thrown away.  This is where I struggle with the public out cry against embryonic stem cell research.  Is it morally superior to destroy and throw away living embryos rather than allowing them to contribute to scientific research?  Where is the debate?

Oh will you ignorant self-delusional right wing wackos please give it a rest! It's so sad that you're all so afraid of the unknown that you choose to subscribe to some ridiculous dogma rather than try to learn, evolve and expand human knowledge and capacity to live a meaningful life.  The single most significant threat to the survival and prosperity of the human race is that damnable cancer of religion.  Get it out of politics, get it out of real science.  Barrack Obama is not a miracle worker and he has a HELL of a mess to clean up thanks to the past eight years of awful government.  Right wing wackos: you had your chance and what's left is a tide of economic, environmental and educational nightmare.  Now step aside and let's get some real work done.  

"President Bush stood for human dignity" a poster wrote.  WHAT?  In what bizzaro world can you come up with THAT little gem of nonsense?  He was the most inept, greedy, pathetic president this country has ever had....bar none.  He stood for himself, for his oil cronies and for right wing wackos.  Good grief.

Scientists are abortionists? Keep talking Rush. Your constituency for wanton ignorance demands you keep feeding them misinformation and ideas selected to set them apart so we can all see who they are and what they stand for. That is ignorance is bliss. What will be will be, god willing. Welcome to fundamentalism. We are not responsible for the world. It is all predestined by diety. Will christian suicide bombers be next? Maybe we can find the answer somewhere in the bible. Scientists are fools to look anywhere else for answers. Bush was our last upstanding and moral president. Unlike during the Clinton years, we did not have to spend years ignoring science, healthcare and our environment in order to determine the true whereabouts of Clintons penis. We had weapons of mass destruction to find, preemptive wars to fight, and democracy to spread to the shitites and suckies. Science? Why ask why?
 

To assert that there was no war on science (either considering the stem cell area or nor) by the Bush administration is ludicrous. Clearly, you must have missed Bush's appointment of his no-research-experience-necessary *proctologist* to head the NIH. Or that awful woman in put in charge at the CDC to remove the mention, use, and illustration of condom use from all AIDS prevention and family planning literature. These are just two exmaples of the absolutely egregarious intervention on scientific finding in the name of lamebrained religious concerns. Get real.  

Ending a life to save a life...I've seen a lot of crosstalk on the subject.

I'm usually open-minded about debating religion against science, saying that most religions don't have an issue on the matter, or allow people to do what they will. But when you place a person's life on the line for a pre-embryo [that, ironically, could grow up to have that same disease], you are getting rid of a life that could make a change for a chance.

You're gambling a life for a chance at life. Putting less in the pot than dealt. It's senseless.

And people will tell me I am wrong for supporting research that could potentailly cure millions. There is no ethical or moral violation for stem cell research, only religious violation. And I usually don't mind religion.

My take on it best goes back to an old addage of the Tyrant and a Savior. A tyrant can kill a thousand people. A savior can kill a tyrant, and save a thousand. Yet, according to religion, they both will be punished, because they killed. The ends are completely ignored, only the means are factored in.

That thinking has to stop. And if people will tell me i'm wrong, I would like to direct them to a little book where a man was told to kill his son, another man sacrified his daughters for two strangers, and millions were killed by one being.

Yet murder is a sin, regardless of the end.

@Tim Rommes - You assume (incorrectly) that people can make informed choices, which is incorrect. That was the whole point, in fact, and why she IS indeed responsible as a doctor and a human. As a doctor, she is charged with doing no harm, and there is no logical denial that her actions did harm to a great number of people. The statistics of the dramatic increase in HIV infections in the US is a pointed illustration of precisely why you are incorrect on this point. You are also incorrect in asserting that Bush's policy was attempting to avoid promoting abortion. Since the fetal tissue used was freely available and some aquired post-abortion (and some from never implanted embryos from fertility sessions), there was no driving force or even logical connections between the two. It's like removing a dropper full of water from the ocean and saying that we have to stop that because the sea level will fall. Get real. Obama's policy chnage has been virtually universally lauded by the scientific community as a logical correction of Bush's (rather cowardly and incoherent) policy. After all, Bush didn't have the moral or political will to stop fetal cell research, so he just make a poorly thought out half-measure that simply ended up wasting valuable reseatch dollars.    

@ Austin Quinn - According to recent statistics, funding medical research through the NIH stimulates the economy. For every dollar that is spent through the NIH, $1.34 is injected into the economy. It's one of the few things that the federal government does that. So, in short, funding science IS funding the economy.

"Science thrives when there is an open and collaborative exchange, not when there are artificial barriers, silos, constructed by the government," Melton said in a statement.

Really!   So I guess that means that you lefties will still be open to some discussion of Global Warming then... Right?

"Deciding to destroy a human being to help other human beings is an unethical decision that cannot be supported."

Somehow I don't think the people on United 93 believed that... thankfully.

Jeff C, You can't really be trying to compare the heroes of 9/11 with Abortion Doctors are you?

There is a HUGE difference between sacrificing your own life to save others, and sacrificing some "other" persons life to save others!  [...]

I wish people would learn the distiction bewteen and embryo and a fetus.  An embryo is a microscopic ball of a few undifferentiated cells.  Only in the fevered imaginations of the religious right is it a "baby".  An acorn is not an oak tree no matter how hard you wish it to be so.  The embryos used for research are leftovers from procedures done in fertility clinics and would be disposed of anyway.

"Life begins when brain waves start and ends when brain waves cease."

'Flatlined' people have been known to recover, espically those who drown in very cold water where the low temperature slows oxygen deprevation damage.

It's not that simple.

"How about we start funding our economy more than scientific reasearch?"

You write as if there's something mutually exclusive about the two...

This particular research isn't just 'for the good of mankind,' somebody will ultimately make money from it. When that happens, would you rather buy it from some other country?

And just what does it mean to 'fund our economy,' anyway?

Patrick M., Philadelphia, PA (3/10, 1130)

Causal or not is, indeed, difficult if not impossible to definitively determine at this point.  During a robbery it is also difficult if not impossible to determine whether or not the assailant will shoot you until he does or doesn’t.  If we can do anything to stop or slow global warming, without making things worse in some other way more than this helps, we should.  Maybe in the end it will turn out that our efforts are only bailing out the ever warming ocean, or maybe we’ll be able to fix it.  I’d hate to have us sit on our collective butt until we scientifically determine that we *could have* done something about it if we’d started by 2010.


Thomas Ashby (3/10, 1150)

Those fetuses (with a nod toward Alan’s comment, but I can’t spell blastocyst, and “fetus” and “abortion” are the keywords in the discussion generally, although it technically goes beyond) aren’t destined to die, unless you’re a Calvanist, but you’re not.  Someone has decided to kill them.  It’s more like implementing a system to harvest organs from prisoners, because the rest of us decide it would be better for the rest of us.  After all, they’re just felons (or the elderly, or disabled, or ugly, or …), they don’t get a say.  Whether or not we condone the killing of those too weak to object is a big issue for those of us way over here on my side of the argument.  Putting the tissue to, what I must assess as, good use after the independent decision to kill it sounds reasonable.  However, once you start some of the following decisions are biased by the fact that it can be given to science to save lives.  In the end it becomes an excuse to murder.  Murder being my private interpretation, it certainly doesn’t get interpreted that way by our legal system.


S.B. Stein, E.B., NJ (3/10, 1513)

How shall we define life?  If having the ability to reproduce is in the definition shall we say that prepubescent children are not alive?


Tim, Ann Arbor, MI (3/11, 1153)

I assume (correctly, I think – but it is *my* assumption) that people can make informed decisions.  That’s part of the reason I vote.  If nobody was capable of making an informed decision I wouldn’t bother.  There’s a line at the polls.  I don’t like lines.  I don’t think they always do make informed decisions.  And sometimes the informed decisions people make are bad.  Aside from information there are issues with intelligence, degree of contact with reality, hopefulness, etc.  The dramatic increase in HIV cases is only proof that people make poor decisions.  As for those who would have been saved by a supply of free condoms:  The reason they contracted is not the supply part of not having a free supply available, there are plenty of condoms available.  Except for the possibility of a very, very, very few cases the free part of not having a free supply available is not the cause, condoms are not that expensive.  Most of the people who contracted HIV that wouldn’t have if there had been an abundant supply of free condoms went into stores that sell condoms and bought a six pack of beer and a pack of smokes instead, or stayed out of the store and bought some suspicious little bag of something.  Not that there’s anything wrong with a six pack and smokes, just that there was a budgeting decision.  And I’ll say it was a bad one.  I don’t particularly think the rest of us should pay for their life long medical care based on their own stupid, self centered decision making process, so I can get behind drop shipping cases of condoms to their doorstep.  The ideology behind not doing that is the issue.  Doesn’t work, but I don’t believe I said I think it works.  I do endorse the idea of expecting reasonable decisions from people and holding them accountable for the outcome of there decisions.  But that seems to be particularly un-American given the last six months.

On the abortion (and other) issue, you only seem capable of looking back.  I’m not suggesting a causal link between the harvesting of tissue from a particular fetus to the killing of that particular fetus.  Perhaps we should congratulate you for seeing that would be ludicrous, at least in most theories of time progression.  I am saying, again now, that once you start that it becomes part of some future decision and there is a causal link between that future decision and the future death of a particular fetus from which tissue is harvested.  To review, in terms you *may* be able to understand:  If I take something on Monday that belongs to you and on Tuesday you tell me it didn’t matter because you were going to throw that thing away, I did not take it on Monday because you were going to throw it away on Tuesday.  If I take something that belongs to you on Monday and you tell me it’s okay on Tuesday, and I take something on Tuesday and you tell me it’s okay on Wednesday, and I take something on Wednesday and you tell me it’s okay on Thursday, then on Thursday I am more likely to take something from you.  The more good, scientific research we do with the carcasses of the unborn the more likely it becomes that people will ignore the moral issues inherent in murdering the unborn.  (And again, the murder part is my moral judgment, not a legal one.)

Jeff C, Raleigh, NC (3/11, 1255)

Taken out of context your comment is something less than stupid.  In context it reads like they sat at the airport and went, “That plain’s going down?  Oh, yes, I’d like a seat on that one.”  Or maybe you’re talking from the terrorists’ viewpoint.  Thankfully they decided to destroy human life.

Joe, Macomb, MI (3/11, 1726), “The embryos used for research are leftovers from procedures done in fertility clinics and would be disposed of anyway.”  This is the greater wrong.  Worse than the woman who decides to kill when she inconveniently got pregnant, these deaths were planned for.

Frank Glover, Rochester, NY (3/11, 1753) wrote, “And just what does it mean to 'fund our economy,' anyway?”

Come on Frank, that’s when you buy US Economy stock.  I can’t find that ticker symbol.??

Many times we've seen agencies change directors in mid-administration. The policies were in place already, only the head changed. Neither policy nor director depended on the other. Why is it being presented that the new administration's policies cannot be put into effect unless and until the new directors are confirmed? The results may be less than if a fully accepted new director were in place, but at least the agencies can be set on their new course.

As for those who claim there was to "war on science", dollars to donuts you aren't scientists either working directly with stem cells (as is my son; regrowth of severed neurons including spinal cords) or whose work is in a field already known to be able to make use of stem cells to effect a cure or improvement (my own; Parkinson's). The scientific research community is subservient to the scientific funding community, the latter of which regularly uses its position to not only control funding but also manipulate public perception. The past administration was more active than any other in manipulating public opinion, especially by enforcing its ethical values into the policies. I've had my work and even my scientific integrity threatened with being questioned if I pursued the stem cell work (I had no intention of it, but was threatened anyway). I know others who did continue and were then investigated, some of whom found themselves facing much higher hurdles in entirely separate areas. Don't tell me there was no war on science; many colleagues and acquaintances and myself were forced by policy makers to defend ourselves, retreat, or suffer scientific damage. We have been under attack for 8 years.

When science as it is usually practiced is confronted with biased material presented as science but intended to force its preconceptions and agenda onto the directions science takes, then science is under attack from something other than its only true adversary, differing opinions from within itself. The material used by the Bush administration to manipulate public opinion and science did not have its origins in science, but rather in their ethical and economic biases. Even when scientific evidence was presented, it was almost invariably pulled apart and shown to be wrong, sometimes even by scientists who held similar opinions but maintained the scientific integrity to want to make their points with replicable evidence rather than preconception.

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