The editorial endorses President Obama's "no one should ever tell a scientist what he can't do" policy. The same philosophy that brought us Mengele (who fittingly ended his days as an abortionist in Argentina), Tuskegee and the like.
Even WaPo sees the problem with that, although it draws the bright line of ethics in a far different place than human dignity demands.
The funding ban Mr. Obama just lifted was on stem cell sources derived from freshly killed embryos. Thanks to the Dickey-Wicker amendment, however, the government still may not directly destroy an embryo, nor create one for purposes of research. That's what this morning's editorial is about.
There's no slippery slope we're always told, and yet only a week after Obama allowed the government to buy dead baby cells, we're already moving on to the next atrocity.
First the Times insisted the government become a market for destroyed embryos, insisting that backwards evangelicals like the President were keeping sick people from cures.
Then the funding ban lifted and the Times suddenly admitted ESCR won't cure; it's totally unnecessary; and it was being fully funded all the time.
Today they say we haven't gone far enough. Nothing will be right with the world until U.S. taxpayers are directly creating human embryos solely to experiment upon them. It'll be fine: an ethics panel will guide us.
Right. Like that 1975 biomedical ethics panel at Health Education & Welfare that signed off on federal experimentation on live babies --infants who'd been aborted but lived. Or the 1979 experiments on low-income black and hispanic fetuses slated for abortion no matter what degree of harm or pain they might cause.
You can always trust an ethics panel.
Update: P.J. O'Rourke slams the President's moral reasoning or lack thereof, saying a high school debate team could do better. He begins by listing some things science has "known" over the years.
The periodic table consists of Earth, Wind, and Fire and a recording of "Got To Get You into My Life."
The world is flat with signs saying "Here Be Democrats" near the edges.
You can turn lead into gold without first selling your Citibank stock at a huge loss.
We're the center of the universe and the Sun revolves around us
Not to mention:
T]he negro would appear to stand on a lower evolutionary plane than the white man, and to be more closely related to the highest anthropoids.
Mentally the negro is inferior to the white.
[A]fter puberty sexual matters take the first place in the negro's life and thought.
The above are quoted--not out of context--from the article titled "Negro" written by Dr. Walter Francis Willcox, chief statistician of the U.S. Census Bureau and professor of social science and statistics at Cornell.
But by all means, let's let the scientists tell us what should be.
