Rebuttal to President's Council criticism of Obama expansion of stem cell research
Last week, ten members of Bush's Council on Bioethics issued a statement criticizing President Obama's lifting of the funding ban on human embryonic stem cell research.The statement, posted by the Hastings Center, is available here. See also our previous post.
In the rebuttal also posted by the Hasting Center, Case Western bioethicist Insoo yun first commiserates with the council's hard work. Then he takes them to task, particularly for implying that Bush's policy enabled research. "To say that the Bush compromise is good enough for American stem cell science is an insult to the researchers and to our fellow citizens," Hyun writes. He also points out that embryonic stem cell research has been and continues to be essential to furthering work on induced pluripotent stem cells and that banning reproductive cloning does not logically require the banning of therapeutic cloning.
