Rich Lowry writes on President Bush’s vindication on the subject of stem cell research, now that scientists have succeeded in turning adult human skin cells into the sought after pluripotent cells.

With the breakthrough that Bush had been hoping for - and talking about since 2006 - his position looks farsighted. The ethical boundary he defended helped push scientists to pursue the new discovery. Bush’s opponents, on the other hand, specialized in simplistic advocacy contemptuous of moral qualms about how stem-cell research was conducted. Their muted reaction to the latest development suggests that for some of them what was so exciting about stem-cell research wasn’t the far-off potential therapeutic applications, but the chance to portray pro-lifers as standing in the way of life-enhancing scientific discoveries.

It should be remembered that President Bush chose this issue for his first televised address to the nation, in the summer of 2001. Pre-9/11, the promotion of a culture of life was one of the main goals of his presidency. (As I recall it, the other major things that Dubya wanted to focus on on the domestic front were education, Social Security, taxes and immigration — some now addressed in substantial ways, others clearly not. Foreign policy initiatives were always going to be dictated in large part by events, and the event on September 11th, 2001 was obviously a defining one like no other could be.)

In that address, by limiting federal funding to the already-existing lines of embryonic stem cells, President Bush ensured a landscape in which there would be incentives for other kinds of stem cell research. John Kerry and John Edwards made this a centerpiece of their 2004 campaign, accusing Bush of being in the sway of theological convictions and of being anti-science, and promising for their part that miracle cures would soon emerge if they were elected. The Democratic party, along with a substantial number of Republicans, continued to push the issue after the election, and President Bush has twice vetoed bills that would have given federal tax money to research requiring the destruction of additional human embryos.

Back in June of this year, when the advances with skin cells were announced as having been successful in mice, I posted the following:

What’s remarkable is that President Bush is still being accused of being “anti-science” by people for whom the real scientific advances in this area are completely irrelevant; all that they see is a political issue on which they believe they can win. Yet, the science has developed to the point where anyone who is still screaming about taxpayer funding for embyronic stem cell research is rapidly beginning to look like someone who wants to destroy human embryos just for the sheer hell of it.

Now that the same success has been achieved with human cells — by researchers both in the U.S. and in Japan — it seems that a punctuation point can actually be put on this issue. Embyronic research will continue, of-course — funded privately and by certain states that chose to jump in to the tune of billions of dollars — but the fact that this kind of work on adult cells is so much easier and cheaper looks almost certain, at least in my mind, to dry up heavy future investment in that area.

So, going on seven years later, a key policy of George W. Bush’s bears real fruit and goes from a subject of derision to an unabashed (if not completely unbashed) success. It’s supportive of the point-of-view he’s expressed a number of time in interviews; namely that history is the best judge of presidential legacies, not polls and pundits.

Those politicians who jumped overboard on the politics of this issue, and used over-simplifications of the science and offensive promises to the sick to manipulate voters with regard to it, will now suffer, in all likelihood: no consequences whatsoever. They will simply move on to the next issue to demagogue. They will not concede that they were wrong, nor are they likely ever to be asked to concede such. That, I think, is just a depressing fact.

So, better to meditate upon the great un-depressing fact: thanks to these latest successes, we are that much further away from a world where people would derive medical treatments out of cells taken from cloned embryonic versions of themselves, stored in a laboratory. I’ve never been able to see it as anything other than the old feeding off of the young, in an affront to nature straight out of a science-fiction nightmare. It’s where it had seemed we were headed at quite some pace. Thank God someone applied the brakes.

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