Stem Cells

By Barb Shelly, Kansas City Star editorial page columnist

U.S. Sen. Sam Brownback's proposed Human-Animal Hybrid Prohibition Act of 2009 is creating a fair amount of hilarity on the Internet. Mermaids outlawed. Spiderman banned. You get the picture.

President Obama advanced the causes of medical research and good sense on Monday.

He reversed President Bush’s illogical executive order that limited federal funding for embryonic stem cell research to just a few cell lines.

By Barb Shelly, Kansas City Star editorial page columnist

President Obama appears ready to lift his predecessor's irrational funding restrictions on human embryonic stem cell research.

By Barb Shelly, Kansas City Star editorial board

All the legal quibbling over language means there will be no proposed constitutional amendment concerning stem cell research on Missouri's November ballot.

Scientist James Thomson may be a hero to President Bush, but the admiration doesn't look to be mutual.

Thomson, a University of Wisconsin anatomy professor, played a key role in the recent discovery that skin cells doctored with four genes could achieve the versatile healing quality previously found in embryonic stem cells.

Bush and others pounced on the news, declaring that the discovery rendered obsolete the need to obtain stem cells from human embryos.

Thomson himself disputed that notion in a commentary he co-authored for The Washington Post with Alan I. Leshner, chief executive of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Should government restrict medical research that has the approval of the mainstream scientific establishment?