"When you shave all the misleading hyperbole away from it, the only issue is direct Federal funding of embryonic research involving new embyronic lines outside of an already-approved cell line.

That's it."

Thats a whole lot of it. It essentially kills embryonic stem cell research in this country. Thats a BIG deal. If you actually look at the impact of the law, federally funded infrastructure can't be used to support research. So you can't, say, turn around a cryo unit from a federally funded project and use it accross the hall on the 'black' ESC project. If the wing of the research lab was build w/Federal funds, you can't perform ESC research in it. So you end up with all the infrastructure costs duplicated for any institution that wants to do research on ESC.

And, all the scientists will tell you, ESCs are the most promising point of research, and the derived lines are not all that robust any more. So stopping ESC has, so far in this country, raped ESC research outside all but a few specific privately funded labs.

Maybe the new technique will end up with Stem Cells of the same quality and type as ESCs... we shall see.

You can't turn around now and cry 'POLITICS!' after censoring science based on irrational faith.

As far as global warming, I don't know what planet you live on, but the facts look pretty much deciseive from where I sit. Our output of CO2 has had a measurable effect on atmospheric composition, raising CO2. The science is pretty clear both in terms of historical analysis and in terms of climate modeling- more CO2=warmer global temperature. If you want to scream that recent waring trends are statistical shadows, lets grant your point just for the sake of argument.... However, pretty soon, we will see antropogenic warming even if we are not seeing it now. The isotopic concentrations are pretty much decisive: the increased CO2 can not be attributed to volcanism, and our CO2 output looks set to continue increasing well into this century. The politics of this is all on your side, the science is on the other.

DL

DL