If National Pride Is What It Takes...
This Yahoo! News article ties together a number of threads from the therapeutic cloning debate last week: the US research establishment has been held back by bad legislation (and the threat of more where that came from), US scientists are now far behind Asia and Europe in vital medical research, and pro-research states are facing off against the anti-research Federal government. I'm no fan of knee-jerk national and state pride, but if that's what it takes to get bad legislation pushed aside and the five-year research setback ended, then that's what it takes. It's great pity, and a comment on the worse aspects of human nature, that the thousands of lives lost each and every day to conditions that might already be treatable were not enough to make this happen.