IN MANY countries, James Thomson and Doug Melton would be lauded by their political leaders as scientific heroes. But in the eyes of the US president, we were told last week, they are murderers. It was an obscene characterisation, but a revealing one, exposing George W. Bush’s morally inconsistent position on stem cell research – which after a tumultuous week continues to stymie the efforts of the world’s leading scientific nation in this important field.
Thomson, working at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, unveiled the first-ever line of human embryonic stem cells (ESCs) back in 1998 and he has produced further lines…
