If You Can’t Win on the Science, Take ‘Em to Court
By Jonathan D. Moreno | Tuesday, August 24th, 2010
Imagine a bizzaro universe in which Bush administration officials have to explain why they were so intent on paying for human embryonic stem cell research that they violated federal law to do it. In that same alternate reality, a court rules that none of the embryonic cell lines used by medical scientists for 10 years could continue to be applied to important research.
If your credulity hasn’t already been strained to the breaking point, now imagine that you’re a scientist who went to his or her lab this morning not knowing if you could continue your work on, say, Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s or diabetes, work that was funded by the National Institutes of Health months ago that you were doing just yesterday. These are all plausible inferences that could be drawn from a United States District Court judge’s August 23 decision.
Welcome to the real world. (Read on …)