"No ban" on stem cell research? Not quite...

As if you had to guess, another Republican deception has been blown to bits today, by that evil, conspiratorial, Charles Krauthammer-publishing Washington Post...

There may be no ban against using stem cell lines created before 2001, but...

All of the human embryonic stem cells available to federally funded scientists under President Bush's three-year-old research policy share a previously unrecognized trait that fosters rejection by the immune systems, diminishing their potential as medical treatments, new research indicates.

A second study has concluded that at least a quarter of the Bush-approved cell colonies are so difficult to keep alive they have little potential even as research tools...


The first study, led by Fred Gage of the Salk Institute in La Jolla, Calif., and Ajit Varki of the University of California at San Diego, focused on a peculiar aspect of the federally approved cell lines: Unlike colonies being derived using newer techniques, all the Bush-approved colonies were initially cultivated in laboratory dishes that also contained mouse cells.

Scientists and the Food and Drug Administration have already expressed concern that animal viruses lurking in those mouse cells might infect the human cells and cause trouble when they are transplanted into patients, as doctors hope to do...

When human blood serum was added to the mouse-cultivated human stem cells in lab dishes, antibodies attacked the stem cells and killed them. In the eyes of the immune system, "these human cells look like animal cells . . . which leads to [their] death," Gage said at a recent scientific meeting.

So let's cut the right-wing garbage that there "is no federal ban on funding" for stem cell research.

Bush has wasted our time, "thinking" about this issue when he should have concentrated on that PDB - the one that read "Bin Laden Determined to Attack the United States>'