In 2004, Vice-Presidential candidate John Edwards promised that if John Kerry won, people would rise out of their wheelchairs and walk. In the 2006 election, actor Michael J. Fox, who suffers from Parkinson’s, made a commercial for Democratic Senate candidates in which he urged voters to support those candidates who opposed restrictions on federal funding for embryonic stem cell research and stood in the way of imminent miracles. Private funding, it should be noted, was never restricted. The only thing that stood in the way of miracle cures from embryonic stem cell research miracle cures, we were told, was the...