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EDITORIAL: Find Cure For Ideology Palm Beach Post Editorial Friday, November 28, 2003 President Bush's Council on Bioethics is reviving attempts to ban therapeutic cloning for research -- and this time, patients suffering from debilitating diseases and scientists seeking cures for them wouldn't be the only potential victims. In its latest inappropriate invocation of ideology, the president is using his panel to urge Congress to assign legal rights to human embryos. Not only would such unnecessary legislation disrupt research toward cures for Parkinson's, diabetes and other widespread diseases, the action would make it harder for infertile couples to conceive. Referring to the embryos as "children-to-be," the panel's draft recommendations -- reported in The Wall Street Journal - - call for the federal government to track the creation, use and disposition of embryos. The panel suggests a ban on using an 11-day-old or older embryo for research, restrictions on surrogate mothers and limits on the reason a woman could get pregnant by in vitro fertilization. Would enforcement require parents to declare that they plan to "produce a live-born child"? How does such a requirement fit the panel's claim that it wants to protect women "against certain exploitative and degrading practices"? According to a study by the Rand Corp. and the Society of Assisted Reproductive Technology, nearly 90 percent of the 396,526 embryos in storage throughout the United States as of April 2002 were designated for future family-building by the patients who created them. Fewer than 3 percent -- 11,000 -- are available for donation for research. Those that are were designated, correctly, by the parents, not the government. Two years ago, President Bush approved spending federal money on embryonic stem-cell research but set limits on the study. The cell lines he approved for federally financed research were initially grown on mouse cells -- which, a medical ethics panel formed by Johns Hopkins University said this month, could expose humans to an animal virus their immune systems could not fight. Safer stem-cell lines, the panel said, now exist but aren't eligible for federal financing. The president would rather allow ideological debates to halt progress. Twenty-five years after the birth of the first "test-tube baby," Congress should not let the president and his advisers distract from the quest for life-saving discoveries. SOURCE: The Palm Beach Post, FL http://tinyurl.com/wv0i * * * ---------------------------------------------------------------------- To sign-off Parkinsn send a message to: mailto:[log in to unmask] In the body of the message put: signoff parkinsn