At no point did GWB restrict embryonic stem cell research. He was the first President in history to fund it, for researchers working with extant cell lines. If researchers wanted to find funding from Universities, States, investors, private industry, whatever, there were no restrictions at all on ESCR.
Do you think the Federal taxpayer-funded trough is the only font of scientiifc inquiry?
And don't you think there would be investors scrambling to put up their own money for ESCR if there were a decent chance it would result in valuable and profitable therapeutic advances?
From the Wall Street Journal:
James Thomson, the first scientist to derive stem cells from a human embryo, made this point clearly just a few weeks ago: "I don't want to sound too pessimistic because this is all doable, but it's going to be very hard." He added, "those transplantation therapies should work but it's likely to take a long time."
"Leading British stem cell expert Lord Winston has been even more blunt: "I am not entirely convinced that embryonic stem cells will, in my lifetime, and possibly anybody's lifetime, for that matter, be holding quite the promise that we desperately hope they will."
Bottom line: private investment money for ESCR has been, at best, a trickle because of the remoteness of the possibility that it will ever pay off. Because as I said, after millions of dollars spent and cutting-edge experiments on 5 continents, all it's been able to produce in vivo is tumors.
Wow...blood cells are tumors?
I said "in vivo".
From the article you cited: "US scientists have developed an efficient way to make mature red blood cells on a large scale using human embryonic stem cells to make young red blood cells and then maturing them in the lab. "But they haven't given them to people and see if they survive," added Shurin.
Later in the article: "One big problem will be the immune system, which will pick up things like the wrong kind of sugars on the surface of the red blood cells. If they don't match what it is expecting, it will treat the red blood cells as unwanted foreign agents and kill them. There's a lot of work to do, said Shurin..."
There's a certain fey humor in the fact that the de-differentiation work they did with these embryonic cells was, in a sense, irrelevant because it was followed by a series of complex procedures to make the cells behave like adult cells and then remove the immune-triggering characteristics. Which wouldn't have been necessary in the first place if they had started with the hypothetical patient's own autologous hemotopoietic stem cells.
Snort.
Subtle twisting of the wording there. I have to hand it to you, your deviousness is more clever than most who post on the topic!
First of all, the claim that two paths of research of equal potential should advance at the same rate if one receives public funds and the other does not, is absurd.
Second, the possibilities that research might take a while and there might not be as much promise as earlier hoped don’t mean they are paths that shouldn’t be pursued.
And as humorous as it is to hybrid techniques, that often is what leads to successes or to broadening of the application of technologies. A person advocating magnetic storage or optical storage could point to the magneto-optical drive as “not pure,” but it is still in use today—and so are both the magnetic and optical storage technologies.