By Gerald Warner, Telegraph
Barack Obama is earning plaudits from the "science" lobby, militant secularists and other usual suspects for his decision to lift the Bush administration's ban on federal funding for embryonic stem cell research today. This is being hailed as a new Enlightenment and it is every bit as bogus as the first.
Embryonic stem cell research is a dead end. Embryonic stem cells have not been used successfully to treat any illness, despite inflated claims that one day they will supply revolutionary new treatments for illnesses ranging from diabetes to paralysis. Dr James L Sherley, a Senior Scientist at Boston Biomedical Research Institute in America, has said: "The promises of cures from cloned human embryonic stem cell research are indeed misguided. Whether extracted from IVF embryos or cloned embryos, embryonic stem cells are unable to mend tissues and organs. Only adult stem cells have this ability, and they possess it naturally."
In contrast to the failure of embryo experimentation, stem cells from umbilical cords and placental blood have already been employed successfully to treat leukaemia and anaemia, while adult stem cells have also worked in trials to treat severe heart failure. Most recently, teams of researchers in Britain and Canada have found a safe way of manufacturing stem cells from a patient's skin. The new technology obviates the need to use viruses, which created a risk of cancer, as well as allowing the transformational genes to be removed after performing their function, preventing them from causing any future damage.
By giving a fiscal boost to research that is both ethically controversial and scientifically futile, Barack Obama is directing science onto a negative course. His allocation of federal funds to embryo experimentation makes American taxpayers complicit in the destruction of days-old human beings. In tandem, his embrace of the "man-made" climate change lobby shows that his supposedly enlightened policy is just a new superstition. Presumably, like the Prince of Wales, he believes we have just 100 months to go before climatic Armageddon.
Obama claims that science, not political ideology, will guide his administration. That is transparently not so. This policy is, to the point of caricature, driven by the ideology of junk science, liberal hysteria, and the aggressive lobbying of interest groups hungry for taxpayers' money. Obama is a sucker, impressed by the white-coat pretensions of lobbyists who are the 21st-century equivalents of those seekers for the Philosopher's Stone who plucked importunately at the sleeves of medieval monarchs ("Sire, I have a project...").
This presidency is now firmly set on the road to political, fiscal, cultural and moral disaster. Change we need... Hope... Oh, yeah.
Source: Telegraph
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