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Buffalo News Editorial Monday, June 14, 2004 Nancy Reagan's plea : Former first lady is right to seek change in U.S. policy on stem cell research "Nancy Reagan knows better than most Americans the terrible pain of Alzheimer's disease: the erasing of memory, the loss of control and self-sufficiency, the agonizing torture of dissolution. Anyone who has seen photographs of the former first lady over the past several years has some sense of the toll Ronald Reagan's decade-long illness has taken on her, let alone the thievery it visited on her husband. Mrs. Reagan seemed to live in a perpetual state of exhaustion, existing on the edge of an emotional collapse. Her devotion to "Ronnie," sometimes mocked during their years in Washington, was no act. Still, she would have been less than human not to wish sometimes that she and her husband might somehow have avoided the miseries of his final years. It's a feeling understood in millions of other families who watch as Alzheimer's inflicts its depredation on those they hold dear. It doesn't have to be just a wish. In stem cell research lies the possibility that those who will otherwise succumb to this terrible affliction and others will be spared their indignities. What is needed is research. What is standing in the way is the president of the United States. Among those telling him he is wrong is Mrs. Reagan. Stem cell research uses embryos three to five days old, a fact that alarms some who equate their destruction with murder. Yet most of these embryos, created for in-vitro fertilization, will ultimately be destroyed anyway. Nevertheless, President Bush in 2001 severely restricted funding for stem cell research, a shortsighted decision that bowed to the religious right while giving scant consideration to millions for whom Parkinson's, Alzheimer's and other such diseases lie in wait. Thus far, Bush is resisting the growing pressure to reverse that decision. Only weeks before Reagan's death, Mrs. Reagan renewed her call for the government to expand its stem cell research. We hope she will continue to make her feelings known about this matter. More than any other individual, the widow of Bush's political hero, and that of tens of millions of American conservatives, has the power to change minds, then policies and then lives. http://www.buffalonews.com/editorial/20040614/1006356.asp ---------------------------------------------------------------------- To sign-off Parkinsn send a message to: mailto:[log in to unmask] In the body of the message put: signoff parkinsn