The whole stem cell thing was silly to start with. The only thing that has really come up as a controversy is the use of Federal funds for such research, which should be privately financed anyway. And it's obvious that the research will go ahead in other nations anyway. A lot of issues like this, like abortion, largely go away when you realize that the issue should not be a Federal one in the first place.

If some valuable treatment does come from processes that are abhorrent to religious conservatives, it would indeed be interesting to see how many of them avoid it out of principle.

Reminds me of the long controversy over the morality of using real and useful data that was collected by the Nazi medical researchers in their foul experiments during WWII.