The Zong

The revelation is at hand: It seems that a team of plucky scientists made some stem cells out of someone’s dandruff, and the Times makes it sound like it was pretty easy, ya friggin’ idiots:

All they had to do, the scientists said, was add four genes. The genes reprogrammed the chromosomes of the skin cells, making the cells into blank slates that should be able to turn into any of the 220 cell types of the human body, be it heart, brain, blood or bone. Until now, the only way to get such human universal cells was to pluck them from a human embryo several days after fertilization, destroying the embryo in the process.

Well, if that’s all you had to do, I’m glad you finally did it. Lazy showoffs.

But seriously, folks, Dana Perino is pissed that folks aren’t giving the President more credit for curing the stem cells. She’s cute when she’s angry:

“President Bush is very pleased to see the important advances in ethical stem cell research reported in scientific journals today,” White House Press Secretary Dana Perino said today. “By avoiding techniques that destroy life, while vigorously supporting alternative approaches, President Bush is encouraging scientific advancement within ethical boundaries.

That’s all well and good, only the fact is that if the Decider had decided to fund more stem cell research at the outset, we might have gotten here years ago. According to James Thompson, the guy who discovered stem cells and is therefore kind of like Satan incarnate to embryo-boosters everywhere, maybe Dana ought to remind the President that he’s actually not a scientist just yet. He’s actually kind of a jerk about this kind of thing:

Thomson, who co-discovered human embryonic stem cells in 1998, credited the president with providing some funds for work starting in 2001 but said Bush’s funding limits “represented very bad public policy as far as I’m concerned. The field has been much slower taking off than it would have been otherwise.”

So as much as I’d hate to blame the President for the years his policy has set back stem cell research in general, I guess I’ll leave that to all the families of the dead folks who’s lives would have been saved if he hadn’t tried to impose his religious beliefs on yet another scientific institution.

- M.G.