[Rockingham]

Adult stem cells also hold great promise but are having similar trouble getting a commensurate level of NIH funding. Public funding of scientific research produces a massive flow of resources but inevitably spends most of it on prevailing scientific fashions, with even private funding tending to follow the leader and starve alternatives.

When scientific fashion is right, progress is rapid. When it is wrong, as it must often be, there is great waste and scientific stagnation.

I suspect that like power from nuclear fusion, embryonic stem cells will consume many billions of dollars to little benefit other than smug affluence for the researchers and their enthusiasts in the funding bureaucracies. But on the way, we will hear many promises of advances yet to come if only they had more time and more money, with little cash to be spared for promising alternatives.

[monocle]

I have always been skeptical of peer review and this article confirms my skepticism. Peer review has become no more than a means for monopolizing intellectual inquiry and has become no less than a form of censorship. If there should be a free market in political discourse or even in pornography in which the consumers decide what is acceptable and what is not, should not there be a free market in scientific ideas and concepts? I would like to see an unbiased study of the costs, both in dollars and human lives, peer review has inflicted on society. The hysteria of global warming, the maniacal focus on cholestrol to the exclusion of other factors and the utter refusal to consider racial differences in health and mental processes are the mere tip of the iceberg of ignorance fostered by peer review.