We've written a number of times about the recent startling breakthrough which revealed that ordinary skin cells can be reengineered into stem cells, bypassing the need to kill human embryos. But not everybody has got the message yet, or chooses to overlook it for political purposes.

In the debate among Democratic presidential candidates yesterday in Iowa, Sen. Hillary Clinton hammered President Bush for "interfering with science"-- a reference to his stem cell policy. This is such a convenient sound bite, such a part of her repertoire, that Clinton couldn't admit that her rhetoric is now not only tired and old but irrelevant. The joint breakthrough brought to us by Drs. James Thomson and Shinya Yamanaka proves that President Bush's policy was wise, prudent, and filled with foresight.

As Colleen Carroll Campbell put it, "In the face of the reprogramming breakthrough, such justifications [for extracting stem cells from human embryos] no longer stand. There now appears to be an efficient, cost-effective way to produce an unlimited supply of genetically matched pluripotent cells without exploiting women or cloning and destroying embryos."

Last month, in an interview with the New York Times's Gina Kolata, Thomson both candidly confessed his own ethical concerns over his own involvement in hollowing out living human embryos--""If human embryonic stem cell research does not make you at least a little bit uncomfortable, you have not thought about it enough"--and his delight at being able "to start a field and then to end it."

A couple of days ago, Dr. Yamanaka made a similar, indeed even more remarkable, admission. In an interview with the Times' Martin Fackler published December 11, Dr. Yamanaka talked about his days as an assistant professor of pharmacology. Some eight years ago he was conducting research that involved embryonic stem cells when he went to a fertility clinic where a friend worked.

"At the friend's invitation," Fackler writes, "he looked down the microscope at one of the human embryos stored at the clinic. The glimpse changed his scientific career."

"When I saw the embryo, I suddenly realized there was such a small difference between it and my daughters," said Dr. Yamanaka, 45, a father of two and now a professor at the Institute for Integrated Cell-Material Sciences at Kyoto University. "I thought, we can't keep destroying embryos for our research. There must be another way."

According to Fackler, Dr. Yamanaka had almost given up in despair, after years of searching. Now "Dr. Yamanaka may have found that alternative," Fackler writes.

"Last month, his was one of two groups of researchers that independently announced they had successfully turned adult skin cells into the equivalent of human embryonic stem cells without using an actual embryo. The other group was led by James A. Thomson at the University of Wisconsin, one of the first scientists to isolate human embryonic stem cells."

The entire story can be read at www.nytimes.com/2007/12/11/science/11prof.html?_r=1&oref=slogin. Let me make just one more hugely important point.

President Bush resisted more pressure than you or I can possibly imagine. Think of all the ugly things that were said about him because he wouldn't offer a fiscal carte blanch to researchers who wanted to scavenge human embryos. The President supposedly didn't care about sick people, was blinded by "ideology" and/or "religion," and was an embarrassment to the scientific community.

But because Mr. Bush stood firm, more research than ever was conducted on ethically acceptable alternatives. The new technique is amazingly simple and promises "the end to the stem cell wars," as many publications put it.

Of course, that is not true. Those who are really dominated by ideology are just as eager today to scavenge human embryos as they were before the Thomson/Yamanaka breakthrough.

However the President was right from the start. And it provided the breathing space--and the opportunity--for the consciences of people like Dr. Yamanaka to find acceptable alternatives.

Although President Bush will never get any credit for this from the "mainstream press," we know the truth. Thank you, President Bush!

Part Two