I hope this is not premature, but pardon me while I engage in a breach of etiquette: From the beginning, I have argued that focusing on embryonic stem cells was a scientific step backwards, and that the need for such research to be supported by tax dollars was simply a sign of it's lack of promise.

For example, way back in 2004, I predicted:

I've said it before, I'll say it again... Every penny put toward the less promising and more [ethically]-challenged area of embryonic stem cells represents a step backwards in terms of delivering real scientific innovation and improvement.

Yet too often, people demand the government rush in where well-educated venture capitalists know better than to tread. If they're not willing to fund some research into some technique which would clearly have tremendous commercial potential, if achieved, it's usually a sign that particular avenue is not as promising as you're being told.

Anyway, I write this to highlight the following argument which appeared recently in the New York Times (via Daily Kos):

Any claim that Mr. Bush’s moral stance drove scientists to this discovery must be greeted with particular skepticism. The primary discoverer of the new techniques is a Japanese scientist who was not subject to the president’s restrictions.

The sentence seems meant to mislead the reader into thinking that Bush had banned certain kinds of research. No: the restriction was on government sponsorship, not scientists. (Of course, some also claim an artist is being "censored" if the government isn't paying him to produce art.)

Yet even if the reader is led into that misconception, one might still wonder: If they're free to do either kind of research, why were they working on skin cells, and not embryos? Indeed, many key adult stem cell discoveries have come from scientists in nations like Japan and South Korea, which would have been, as the Times points out, not affected by US domestic funding policies.

A complete mystery, certainly, since almost all intelligent researchers should have focused on embryonic stem cell research, as promising as it purportedly was. Only backwards religious fundamentalists (or so we're told) would have favored any other approach.

My non-sarcastic point here is that the argument cuts the opposite way from what the Times intends: it demonstrates the rightness of Bush's funding priorities, in that even in a nation which allegedly has no bias between the two competing techniques (embryonic versus adult cell research), the most promising gains have come from the technique the Times itself has repeated derided as unpromising and inferior.

I blogged about this same team (and apparently the same, or a very similar discovery) back in June. I wonder what's changed now.