Obama hits a home run repealing stem cell research ban

WASHINGTON, March 9 (UPI) -- President Barack Obama's decision Monday to restore federal funding for embryonic stem cell research has been welcomed across the U.S. scientific community. And in an era of almost unrelentingly dire economic news, it carries the promise of encouraging major investments to defend the United States' position over the past century as the leading global center for research and development in cutting-edge medicine.

Obama has carefully modeled many of his responses to the huge economic crisis he inherited on those of President Franklin D. Roosevelt confronting the Great Depression 75 years ago. His executive decision announced Monday actually shows striking parallels with the repeal of Prohibition, which required a constitutional amendment that FDR strongly supported.

Like Prohibition, the limitation on stem cell research was meant to prevent or roll back the potential for great evil. Prohibition was meant to combat the ravages of unregulated and controlled drinking and alcoholism across the United States. But it played into the hands of organized crime and gave criminal groups in America's major cities unprecedented wealth and power.

Former President George W. Bush's tough restrictions on embryonic stem cell research were also ethically driven because Bush and his supporters believed that using embryonic stem cells for experimentation was tantamount to abortion. However, medical experts across the United States have been virtually unanimous in arguing that the cells in question were not biologically capable of sustaining themselves independently and there was absolutely no possibility of human awareness or potential for suffering and pain, as there certainly is in late-term, third-trimester abortions.

The use of the cells is regarded as essential for opening exceptionally promising lines of research that could lead to cures for many serious diseases and medical conditions, experts believe.

Obama showed his shrewd political touch in several ways with his executive order. It is broadly very popular, including among the centrist voters who ensured his election. It also provided a welcome boost to stem cell research companies; the stocks of several such companies soared immediately by 25 percent to 40 percent on Wall Street on receipt of the news.

Obama, however, left the tough question to Congress as to whether it should be permissible to create new embryonic stem cell lines for research. The Democrat-controlled House and Senate are virtually certain to approve that decision, and Obama will then sign it into law. There will certainly be opposition and fierce criticism from elements of the religious right, but the U.S. medical and scientific communities will be overwhelmingly supportive of the president, as they were today.

Obama was also sending a broader signal to the entire U.S. scientific community that he is determined to take them seriously and to include their institutions and consensus positions reached on major scientific issues of public relevance in his decision-making progress.

Bush was widely criticized for ignoring mainstream, widely agreed-upon American scientific opinion on a wide range of issues, most notably global warming and stem cell research. At first, this did not affect Bush's general popularity. But after the city of New Orleans was flooded by Hurricane Katrina in 2005, Bush received a lot more heat for his refusal to take issues of global climate change much more seriously.

Bush and the Republican Party establishment were eventually widely criticized for waging an alleged "war on science" that also included conservative GOP support for the teaching of intelligent design at American schools as an alternative theory to evolution.

Obama wants to keep that label fixed on the Republican Party. He is trying to convince the American people that he wants to work with the U.S. scientific establishment constructively on a wide range of issues rather than ignore them, belittle them or pay them lip service but then refuse to implement their recommendations.

Obama has already appointed Nobel Prize-winning physicist Steven Chu as his energy secretary, a vital position to make key decisions about where to channel many billions of dollars into urgently needed alternative-energy research. Bush and his officials were widely criticized for, among other things, allowing up to 20 percent of the annual U.S. corn crop to be diverted for ethanol production. This proved a bad investment as grain -- especially corn -- prices soared, and then when the current economic crisis depressed previously record oil prices, corn ethanol -- already widely criticized by chemists for its poor energy yields -- was temporarily priced out of the market.

There doesn't appear to be a political downside to Obama's decision on stem cell research. His fiercest critics on the issue were already his implacable foes anyway. The boost that stem cell research companies have received from his decision is a rare and welcome piece of good economic news. And any scientific progress that emerges during the next four years on the issue will redound to the president's credit, too. From the White House's point of view, what's not to like?