elfs | Lies, damned lies, and hellish lies (Reply)

Gary Bauer, who was disgraced from his role in partisan politics almost a decade ago, has a bizarre article in World Net Daily (ah, the psycho gift that keeps on giving) about how conservatives are more "pro-science" than liberals. He cites a rather strange list of what he considers "scientific facts" that bolster his conservative position, some of which are simply skewed and have little to with actual science, some of which one must have drunk his flavor of kool-aid to accept, and one of which is raw politics, but it's this one that makes me want to jump up and down, preferably on the throat of the entire conservative "sound science" movement:

On stem cell research, too, the conservative position is winning. While the left chastises conservatives as "anti-science" for opposing embryo-destructive research, ethical adult and umbilical cord stem cell research have proved much more promising. Recently, independent teams of researchers successfully reprogrammed adult cells to behave like embryonic stem cells, allowing them to grow and potentially turn into any type of body tissue. By all accounts this new research should eliminate demand for destroying human embryos for research.

Does he realize just how baldface this lie is? Let's start with the basics: the teams that made the breakthrough discoveries regarding adult stem cells were not in America. They weren't subject to our laws. They were in the UK, Korea, and Japan. A follow on research program was done at University of Pennsylvania, but it relied on data taken from the Japanese team, data which the Japanese team initially generated using embryonic stem cells! None of this research would have been possible without embryonic stem cells seeding the initial research lines. You just can't get there from here without studying how embryonic stem cells work. All four teams working in this field admit this openly. Yet Bauer wants to hide it, wants to lie about it to the WorldNut readers who lap this crap up with their mother's milk, because he wants to claim that, somehow, he's on the side of "science," and "science" is on his side.

Man, I am just furious this week at all the nonsense.