If Obama must screw up, can he do it more in this direction than the one he tends to head in:
On Wednesday, only two days after he lifted President Bush’s executive order banning federal funding of stem cell research that requires the destruction of human embryos, President Barack Obama signed a law that explicilty bans federal funding of any “research in which a human embryo or embryos are destroyed, discarded, or knowingly subjected to risk of injury or death.”
The provision was buried in the 465-page omnibus appropriations bill that Obama signed Wednesday. Known as the Dickey-Wicker amendment, it has been included in the annual appropriations bill for the Department of Health and Human Services every fiscal year since 1996.
The amendment says, in part: “None of the funds made available in this Act may be used for—(1) the creation of a human embryo or embryos for research purposes; or (2) research in which a human embryo or embryos are destroyed, discarded, or knowingly subjected to risk of injury or death.”
Well, at least it’s a screw up in the right direction. For the record, embryonic research has been a proven failure. Nothing but cancerous growths have come of it, while now we can generate endless amounts of stem cells from human skin – which are basically identical to embryonic stem cells. Human skin is the one organ that can be grown and harvested continuously. With a basically endless supply of human skin, we have plenty of stem cells.
But the real success stories are in the Adult Stem cell field which has numerous therapies out already (just scan through the posts). Embryos – none. We don’t need to slaughter young human beings for spare parts.
Addendum: It is my understand that the legislation trumps any Executive Order, so the ban is still in place.
