Michael Fumento

Wesley J. Smith has a good piece in the Weekly Standard on the "baloney, baloney, and pure baloney" of embryonic stem cell hype, both in terms of progress (or lack thereof) and funding. Writes Smith, "When confronted with these and many other astonishing advances in non-embryonic research, ESC boosters defensively complain that ESC research has been stymied by President Bush's federal funding limitations. Yet in 2003, the National Institutes of Health funded more than $20 million for ESC studies--with more funds available but not spent, due to the relative scarcity of qualified applications."

Compared to ESCs, ASCs are 64-bit CPUs versus punch cards that don't even work yet -- and may never. One website lists 74 ASC therapies already in use, but it's about two years old and there are far more now.

For example, it lists "cardiac disease" as a potential future application but the use of marrow stem cells for rebuilding hearts (both muscle and blood vessels) is moving from experimental to therapeutic. Conversely, not only are there no ESC treatments; there has never even been an ESC clinical trial. As I write this there are 850 ASC clinical trials. (Check-mark the box in the upper left-hand corner.)

Taking money away from ASC research to give to ESC research is pretty much tantamount to murder.