The interview brought up something I hadn't considered, that he didn't have control over the time when the ad was filmed, which would put a different light on things.

I also did some more research tonight, inspired by one of Mary Anne's posts below on medication, and found that his medication essentially--to oversimplify--requires Fox to trade off clarity of speech with excessive movement. This fact also came up on a radio interview I located online, where this trade-off was specifically mentioned by Fox.

Given that information I found, and what I got from the interview, I was wrong to say Fox deliberately chose to appear at his worst in the ad. It's entirely possible he tried to medicate for clear speech in spite of whatever additional movement problems that would create, and if he had only limited filming time, the choice of his condition at the time of filming would not have been his.

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For the record, I'm not that hard over on the stem cell issue in either direction. Research proceeds apace in non-embryonic stem cells, and in non-Federally-funded embryonic research, and in Federally-funded embryonic research on a certain class of cells.

On one hand, it seems a bit stupid to not use embryonic cells for research that are routinely discarded anyway in the practice of embryonic implantation, which apparently nobody thinks is evil.

But it's also stupid to claim that lack of Federal funding for a part of embryonic research is somehow halting all progress in the field. Particularly annoying is the constant blending of "embryonic stem cell" with the larger field of "stem cell" so that those who oppose the former are accused of wanting to stop all stem cell research.

Politics and money are in danger of overriding science in this area. The politics and ethical issues are obvious from the conservative side, but not too many people want to admit what's going on from the other side, with scientific hype and grabs for funding. The Korean incident is just the most obvious case of this. I have a lot of concern about what's going to happen with the California stem cell money, too.

It's great to think some kind of magic cures are going to come specifically only from embryonic research. My wife has MS, and I wouldn't mind a magic cure or two myself. But you need to be careful about who's selling what, and what the motivations are.

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Also for the record, I have always been a fan of Michael J. Fox, and I don't think anyone will deny it takes a lot of guts to appear in public like he does for his cause. IMO, as an ad for stem cell research, I would say that this interview is ten times more effective and informative than the ad for Amendment 2.