President Barack Obama is rescinding the U.S. ban on research on new lines of embryonic stem cells. The narrative that his administration is promoting is that this research is "pro-science," and that the Bush ban on such research was "anti-science" due to ignorance about the potential of stem cells. To strengthen the narrative, the propagandists seek intentionally to confuse the difference between the two major types of stem cells used in research.

Therapies using so-called "adult" stem cells, which can be obtained without significant harm to the donor, show great promise as potential treatments for diseases from heart disease to diabetes. Embryonic stem cells, which are obtained only after killing the human donor, have so far proven to be more problematic, as they have a tendency to form tumors called teratomas.

Julia Dory Ransohoff, a 17-year-old prodigy who has conducted her own stem cell research, has appeared in the news as a finalist for the Intel Science Talent Search. She was invited to meet the President as part of the pro-embryonic stem cell research propaganda effort.

But here's the "lie," which is actually an omission meant to confuse: Ms. Ransohoff's research is not on embryonic stem cells at all. She used adult stem cells from bone marrow. She found that heterologous stem cells to treat heart disease elicit a greater immune response for female donors than for male donors (that's the "sex").

The tactic used by supporters of embryonic stem cell research is to cloud the ethical questions surrounding it by failing to distinguish between embryonic and adult stem cells. There is no serious ethical opposition to the use of adult stem cells. Bioethicists from all sides of the debate agree on that point. Failing to make the distinction is dishonest and dishonorable.

Image: Mouse dendritic cells (a type of immune system cell) derived from bone marrow adult stem cells. Source: National Cancer Institute.

Update: After I published this post, I saw this headline: "Obama moves to separate politics and science." Just as I said, the Obama administration is trying to paint the issue as one of noble science v. extremist politics, rather than as an ethical debate.

I am a cradle Catholic, but not a typical cradle Catholic. My mother was deeply suspicious of Vatican II and of the new, vernacular liturgy (the Novus Ordo Missae), so I grew up loosely affiliated with parishes of the Priestly Fraternity of Saint Pius X (SSPX).

Background on the SSPX

The Society of Saint Pius X is a radical traditionalist group whose leadership was excommunicated in 1988. The story is long and complex, but in a nutshell, the head bishop, Marcel Lefebvre, illicitly consecrated four more bishops, by which action (according to the Vatican) all the bishops involved incurred a canonical latae sententiae excommunication as a result of direct disobedience.

One of Pope Benedict XVI's major missions has been to normalize relations with the SSPX, and the Catholic blogs and news sources have been abuzz with the word that the Pope last week lifted the excommunications on all the bishops of the SSPX.

Bishop Richard Williamson's infamous remarks

Unfortunately, there has been one "black sheep" SSPX bishop doing his best to muck things up. The man who confirmed me, Bishop Richard Williamson, has made many outrageous statements over the years (he once opined that Pope John Paul the Great had a "weak grasp" of Catholicism), and most recently he has publicly denied some aspects of the Holocaust.

The current head of the SSPX, Bishop Bernard Fellay, has made an extraordinary statement in response to Williamson's remarks. According to the blog Creative Minority Report, always a good source for Catholic gossip, Fellay "prohibited him, pending any new orders, from taking any public positions on political or historical questions," and publicly apologized to the Pope and to "all people of good will" for Williamson's statements.

CNN misses the point

CNN, which is among the worse of sources for Catholic gossip, has been silent on this entire issue until Monday. The headline did not refer to the historic end of the twenty-year excommunication, or to the remarkable lengths the Pope is taking to bring lost sheep back into the flock. No, the headline, astonishingly, was about the Jews: "Pope outrages Jews over Holocaust denier."

I wholeheartedly agree with Jewish leaders that Williamson's public opinions about the Holocaust are outrageous. They are outrageous not only to Jewish people, but to all "people of good will." I'm outraged. We're all outraged.

But Williamson was not excommunicated for denying the Holocaust. He was excommunicated for being consecrated a bishop, in open defiance of the will of Pope. The excommunication was an internal, administrative Catholic matter. It had nothing to do with teaching, beliefs, or opinions. And likewise, lifting the excommunication had nothing to do with teaching, beliefs, or opinions.

Bishop Fellay's public censure of Bishop Williamson could not have been expressed more forcefully. With all due respect to Jewish leaders, understandably stunned by Williamson's comments, they should take their cues from this response, not from the contemporaneous but unrelated lifting of the excommunication.

On the site ObamiconMe, one can create images in the style of the famous "CHANGE" poster for Obama. (See my profile.) A change feared by many Americans is the passage of the Freedom of Choice Act (FOCA), which would undoubtedly increase the rate of abortion and, according to some reports, require hospitals and clinics to provide elective abortions even if the management opposes the procedure.

These "Obamicons" feature the juniormost Leave the lights on blogger, my 13-month-old son. They're under a Creative Commons license, so feel free to share them. If you put one or both on your blog, you can add a link on the Mr. Linky widget below. Please note that if you do not post one of these posters, your link will be deleted.





Edit: Added new versions with improved backgrounds. For the original images, see Choose Life and Fight FOCA.

I've gotten less political here as the U.S. presidential election draws near. But I just have to comment on this bone-headed study, described in a Houston Chronicle story with the asinine title "Liberal versus conservative: DNA may tell."

What are the problems with the study? First, the research methods are flawed, because the concepts of "liberal" and "conservative" are very subjective and specific to modern United States culture. And second, the conclusion reached by the researcher being interviewed is far more than what is supported by the data.

The researchers started by having their sample fill out questionnaires on social policies such as "support for the war in Iraq, support for or opposition to immigration, opposition to gun control, [and] support for the death penalty." Each of these is a complex issue with nuanced arguments, about which many people have complex opinions, but since they were part of a questionnaire, it is likely that ratings were obtained simply on a polarized scale. My own opinion on the death penalty, for instance, cannot be classified into simple support or oppose; it would take me at least a couple of paragraphs to explain it.

The issues were categorized into "socially protective" and non-"socially protective" policies, about which the interviewee says "certainly there's a left-right orientation." Being themselves mired in American political culture (the study took place at Houston's Rice University), the researchers apparently cannot even see their own bias in labeling the various policies as "left" or "right." To them, "socially protective" policies are right-wing, not left-wing — even though in some cases, policies considered liberal could be seen as more "socially protective" than the corresponding conservative policies.

For example, the researchers considered opposition to gun control, classically a conservative position, as a "socially protective" policy, which fits their data (which I will get to below). Yet arguments in favor of gun control, classically liberal, always have a socially protective pitch; if not to protect innocent people from being killed by guns, why restrict them?

The biases of the researchers make the data worthless for the purpose the researchers are seeking — determining whether one's place on the political spectrum has at least a partial biological basis. Yet even if the data were good, the conclusion announced by the interviewee is on another planet from what those data actually show.

What the data show is that people who favor "socially protective" policies (the ones pre-defined as "conservative") have stronger physiological responses to anxiety-provoking situations (disturbing images and startling sounds) than those who do not favor those policies. Physiological response to stress is strongly tied to psychological factors whose biological basis is unclear at best. But the interviewee cites some concrete numbers, apparently pulled out of thin air: "Probably two-thirds of the explanation is outside of biology," with the rest based on specifically on DNA. Keep in mind that this study did not look at genetic factors at all. There is absolutely no support for saying that correlation between biology and politics, if it exists at all, is based on DNA rather than on environmental effects on one's biology. In other words, there is no investigation into whether the results come from nature or from nurture. (In fairness, this conclusion is not presented in the abstract of the study itself.)

This study was published in the prestigious journal Science, yet almost all of the researchers hail from the field of political science. Only two of the eight authors have any background in psychology, and only one of those is clearly identified with biological psychology. As with some other journal articles, how this nonscientific rubbish passed peer review is a mystery.