If you read internet science in 2006, you'd have thought former president George W. Bush's limitations of use of embryonic stem cell lines had killed science.  In reality, embryonic stem cell research only received $15 million in US funding when the restrictions were imposed and it grew to billions per year during his presidency so some of that rhetoric was designed simply to engage in cultural spin and mobilize votes for Democrats. With a Democrat president and a bulletproof majority in the Senate, culturally-inclined science bloggers can now instead focus on religion and maybe the few Republicans still out there and the rest of us can tackle serious issues, like how to educate people on stem cell research so they can make informed policy decisions. read more

"Science has always moved faster than social debate or society's ability to grapple with these issues," says Debra Mathews, Ph.D., lead author of a paper published in the July issue of Cell Stem Cell and assistant director of science programs at the Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics.
"Although many welcome the prospects for disease prevention and health promotion that such research should facilitate, many others will find the treatment of human embryos in such blatantly manipulative ways to be ethically unacceptable," the authors said in their paper.