I'm glad Salk wasn't a Bush

Laura Bush could not have expected to end the argument over stem cell research with her tepid proclamation: "We don't even know that stem cell research will provide cures for anything -- much less that [cures] are very close." Do you see that next hill? We're not going to climb it because there may be nothing worthwhile on the other side. That's not how Americans approach life or the world, of course. We climb the hill. So what Mrs. Bush is really doing is making a persuasive case for upending her husband's restrictive policies, which have severely limited research on therapeutic cloning in this country. After all, the Wright brothers could not have known that their clumsy contraption would shrink the globe, allowing wide-ranging travel that has transformed whole cultures. They didn't even know the darn thing would fly. But they believed it would. [more ]