Charles Krauthammer's embryonic brain

A little press-commentary comparison shopping is in order following the recent news of a breakthrough in the effort to produce stem cells without using embryonic cells. I promise this won't take long. First, the Washington Post's Charles Krauthammer, who announced that Bush was right all along to restrict federal funding for embryonic stem cell research:

That Holy Grail has now been achieved.

Now, the words of the editors of New Scientist:

Impressive as this research is, it is not yet the hoped-for panacea.... there is still a long way to go before they can be used as transplants. ... For one thing, researchers are not yet certain that what they have produced are identical to embryonic stem cells. Proving this has been difficult in the past. More importantly, to make the skin cells regress, they were infected with a virus -- a method likely to be ruled as unsafe for making transplants.

And from Alan Leshner, publisher of the journal Science, and James A. Thomson,a professor of anatomy at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health:

Far from vindicating the current U.S. policy of withholding federal funds from many of those working to develop potentially lifesaving embryonic stem cells, recent papers in the journals Science and Cell described a breakthrough achieved despite political restrictions. In fact, work by both the U.S. and Japanese teams that reprogrammed skin cells depended entirely on previous embryonic stem cell research.

Leshner and Thompson were writing, also in the WaPo, in response to Krauthammer, who, incredibly, was a member of the President's Council on Bioethics for five years. And yet he seemed to have learned nothing from that experience.