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.
Oh, quite true. A wealth of public subsidy going to one option will often dry up funding to other options, simply because the amount of money is not infinite. By way of analogy, if Obama succeeds in getting huge subsides for his fave energy options (wind, photovoltaics, whatever) do you suppose there will be much money left over for new efficient coal technologies?
Obviously not. Even the "old" efficient coal technologies, like fluidized bed combustion, will be forced out when the Obamagreen choices are fully funded, cost-effectiveness be damned.
But check this out: the "wealth" of public funding is going to ECSR, not to provably therpeutic Adult Stem Cell research.
California (now in dire financial straits) committed three billion dollars to ESCR.
The disgraced former Governor of New Jersey, James McGreevey, established the state-funded Stem Cell Institute of New Jersey with tens of millions of dollars in taxpayer funds. Even in 2008, Massachusetts authorized one billion taxpayer dollars to fund ESCR.
They have produced nothing, not one damn thing, of therapeutic value, and yet those are funds that truly promising Adult Stem Cell rsearchers are NOT going to get.
Ordinarily, such a bias in public funding enriching one option (ESCR) would starve the other options (like Adult Stem Cells) into garbled, fragmentary projects. But interestingly, Adult Stem Cell research is so dramatically productive, that they are surging ahead without the kind of "technology-whiskey-sexy" government-funded glamor which has been pumped into ECSR.
The fact that private research centers and investors are still going gung-ho for the Adult Stem Cell research is truly stunning testimony to the fact that they know where the cures are coming from.