Precisely.
"Just this morning, a story was published showing that ESS-based vaccines prevented lung cancer in mice with an 80-100% success rate. "Researchers believe that it will be possible to produce cancer vaccines in humans from embryonic stem cells."
Here I would beg to disagree with your premise, and I invite the reader to step back and think critically about this information. It's one thing to claim that embryonic stem cell therapy can prevent cancer in rats in a laboratory under controlled conditions. It's entirely another to infer from limited data that cancer can be prevented in humans.
John Eaton has left an awful lot to the imagination here. Going to the press before presenting your findings to your peers for scrutiny and review is very poor science. It's meant to get the public behind a practice that has not been peer-reviewed yet in order to put pressure on agencies who are responsible for approving therapies for human use.
Now, if my memory serves me correctly, this is the exact practice for which Merck was hammered, wasn't it? Why is it now suddenly acceptable for stem cell researchers to practice the same sensationalism?
Think about it: why else would this person go to the press? To offer hope? Why not wait until his peers have reviewed his data and given their agreement that the results are valid? Having the added weight of successful peer review would have given teeth to Eaton's claims. Right now, Eaton's claim has no validity.
And then you have to acknowledge that stem cell researchers have not practiced scientific methods, and one of their most notable figures turned out to be a fraud.
Do not allow your desire for something to be possible override your ability to think critically. We all want answers to the problems. But junk science will not get us there. Neither will politicization of the research. There is a lot of pressure from activist groups to sway scientific opinion, and any time that happens, research sails swiftly into torpedo water.
I'll pile on with 60Gunner with a negative opinion about ESS. Much of the work done with ESS isn't about the science, but about the politics, money, and arrogance of scientists. ESS researchers, I think, are wildly overpromising the potential of the research. Sure, you never know where basic research will lead until you actually do it, but the resources to do science are limited and you make choices about what to fund or not to fund. ESS work often operates with a real strong PR element and a lot of advocacy and activism more like the Global Warming crowd. Who says that scientists aren't political and that there politics doesn't influence their scientific judgment?
On the main point of this thread, I think a lot of people have raised some great points both pro and con about Rush's effect or non-effect on the elections. That's what's great about Free Republic. Great arguments, well presented.