Stem Cell Stuff
I saw this article at the MSN home page announcing that some celebrities are putting out their own ads countering the ad featuring Michael J. Fox. The celebrities in the counter ads are worried about human cloning. Seriously. Human cloning.

The things stem cell research scientists want to work on have very little to do with human cloning. Scientists are trying to develop methods of doing things like repair the myocardium following an ischemic event or regenerating islet-beta cells in type I diabetics. The only people obsessively thinking about human cloning are people that wouldn't know a cell culture hood from a centrifuge.

Here and here are a couple of short articles presenting attempts to use adult hematopoietic stem cells (the non-embryonic ones) in two different settings. My take on this is if you can follow these articles, even roughly, let's say enough to be able to reference them (I'm being giving here, others might require an ability to critique the research.), great, let's talk about problems with stem cell research. Otherwise, shut the f#$k up.

If embryonic stem cell is a great ethical dilemma for the "love the fetus, hate the child" crowd, this article should help ease their worries. It reviews recent embryonic stem cell research that leaves the embryo unscathed.

Forgive me if I sound grouchy in this post. I've seen science suffer under an administration bowing to a religious extremist voting block. Also, if any of the links don't work, email me and I can email pdf's to you.