The Great Stem Sell and Other Mistakes - Christianity Today Magazine

The big mistake that the mainstream media have made, according to CT, is thinking that they have successfully sold the country on the notion of embryonic stem cell (ESC) research. They have done no such thing. The new VCU Life Sciences Survey run by Virginia Commonwealth University's Center for Public Policy presents evidence that is, at best, ambivalent. They show a few more people than before believing in ESC's, but even so, only 14 percent of respondents believe that ESC's show the greatest promise. 37 percent see greater promise in umbilical cord blood stem cells or stem cells from other, similar sources. (Surprisingly, only 7 percent recognize the promise--and the fulfillments--of adult stem cells.)

What ought to make more scientists take notice is some clear evidence that the American public are not willing to trust them implicitly, if they ever were. More than half of all respondents believe that scientists pay too little attention to moral and ethical issues.

In the Golden Age of the Movies, and especially in the 1930's and 1940's, the studios cranked out many, many films showing scientists going too far, with results that would make any honest man (or especially an honest woman) shudder. These movies, in turn, had their basis in some true Victorian-era classics. Two of my favorites in this regard are Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus by Mary Shelley, and The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson. The former dealt with an ill-advised scheme to "bestow animation on lifeless matter," which resulted in the creation of a murdering thug who ended up attempting suicide by fleeing to the Arctic. The latter dealt with an equally ill-advised (and totally unfounded) attempt by another foolish scientist to release his "inner demon" by pharmaco-chemical means.

Neither did they change their minds about their murders, their drug abuses, their mutual prostitutions, or their thefts.

Revelation 9:21, paraphrased from the Greek

No, the American people don't imagine that someone is creating a monster, or negligently making himself non compos mentis in order to get away with rape and murder and blame it on his alter ego. But people are clearly regarding the profession of science with a jaundiced eye. The insistence on ESC's, in the face of the widespread popularity of obstetrical ultrasonography that lets pregnant women see the life growing within themselves, is directly responsible for this change.

And for those of you who insist that science is all about finding the truth, and that no one can disagree with that--well, I offer you Francis Crick and Leslie Orgel and their goofy "directed panspermia" theory that we all descend from a missile laden with bacteria and blue-green algae. Tell me another one, white coats.