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William Saletan on the Forced Marriage of Stem Cell Opponents

Saletan pens "You're Having My Baby - The forced marriage of stem-cell opponents" in today's Slate, in which he does some clever juxtaposition of the folks who testified to the Senate on the madness of "alternate sources" for embryonic stem cells. The whole debate seems like something out of 1984 - full of double talk and acting and a ballet of appearance and reality. It is mild compared to the Schiavo case, but nutty nonetheless, as we've opined again and again and again here. Saletan does a nice job painting the hearings:

Tuesday morning, I drive past the White House on my way to a stem-cell hearing on Capitol Hill. It feels like one of those basketball playoff series that go back and forth from one city to the other. A month and a half ago, proponents of embryonic stem cell research—for simplicity's sake, I'll call them the pros—pushed a research funding bill through the House, establishing their supremacy in Congress. Then the series moved to the White House, where the antis scored a victory as President Bush pledged to veto the bill.

Now the series moves back to Congress. The pros have orchestrated this hearing. All the senators present are on their side, as are three of the four advocates scheduled to testify. The lone anti witness, Stanford biologist Bill Hurlbut, serves on Bush's bioethics council but opens his remarks by quoting President Clinton's. That's what you have to do in the other team's building.

But it turns out that the pros aren't in control of this game. In fact, it isn't a game, and this is no longer a series. It has become a dialogue, born of each team's failure to eliminate the other. The pros, by winning a referendum in California last fall and passing the House bill, have forced the antis to propose alternative, non-lethal ways of getting embryonic stem cells. The antis, by offering four such ideas in a report from Bush's bioethics council, have forced the pros to apply their scientific ingenuity to those ideas. The ethics and the science are all mixed up. It's beautiful.