By Dave Andrusko

A quick, and embarrassing, preface. I really goofed yesterday. I flatly messed up the nuts and bolts of a story about an important admission that there is a link between abortion and breast cancer from someone who has long denied the ABC link. I honestly don't know what I was thinking when I proof-read the operative paragraph, but...

Rather than point out the mistake, which would probably only compound the error and confuse everyone, I have run a corrected Part One from Tuesday as Part Three today. Sorry!

Please send your comments to daveandrusko@gmail.com.
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It's not often, even in a backhanded way, that proponents of embryonic stem cell research confess that, to date, it's been a long road leading nowhere. Well, if you read an article from the Los Angeles Times and a blistering editorial from Investors Business Daily, you can't miss that the real action is exclusively in adult stem cell research. Not to toot our own horn, but National Right to Life has been saying that from the very beginning.

Referring to the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine the Times wrote,

"For 3 1/2 years, the agency focused on the basic groundwork needed to someday use human embryonic stem cells to replace body parts damaged by injury or disease. Such cures are still far in the future.

"Now the institute has a more immediate goal: boosting therapies that are much further along in development and more often rely on less glamorous adult stem cells. It is concentrating its vast financial resources on projects that could cure conditions such as age-related macular degeneration, AIDS, sickle cell disease and various types of cancer." (See www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-sci-stem-cells10-2010jan10,0,725609,full.story.)

Wow! As those who have kept track of this "boondoggle" (bioethicist Wesley J. Smith's characterization), this is an incredible turnaround and a humiliating admission (my words). I could not possibly say it better than the IBD editorial:

"California's Proposition 71 was intended to create a $3 billion West Coast counterpart to the National Institutes of Health, empowered to go where the NIH could not -- either because of federal policy or funding restraints on biomedical research centered on human embryonic stem cells…Five years later, ESCR [embryonic stem cell research] has failed to deliver and backers of Prop 71 are admitting failure. The California Institute for Regenerative Medicine, the state agency created to, as some have put it, restore science to its rightful place, is diverting funds from ESCR to research that has produced actual therapies and treatments: adult stem cell research. It not only has treated real people with real results; it also does not come with the moral baggage ESCR does.

"To us, this is a classic bait-and-switch, an attempt to snatch success from the jaws of failure and take credit for discoveries and advances achieved by research Prop. 71 supporters once cavalierly dismissed. We have noted how over the years that when funding was needed, the phrase "embryonic stem cells" was used. When actual progress was discussed, the word "embryonic" was dropped because ESCR never got out of the lab." (See
www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/Article.aspx?id=517870.)

I really do want you to read both pieces and Part Two of TN&V, so let me end by quoting from Smith's conclusion :

"But eventually, all parties have to come to an end. Proposition 71 can now be seen as a disaster, its mismanagement a disgrace, with hubris the coin of its realm."

Part Two
Part Three