It made for big news when President Bush confidently declared on prime-time television last month that private research had produced a trove of more than 60 stem-cell lines. Most experts had assumed that there were as yet only a dozen or so such colonies of the cells that might become weapons against a range of debilitating diseases, from Alzheimer's to juvenile diabetes to Parkinson's. The vastly larger number was enough, Bush said, to "explore the promise and potential of stem-cell research"--and, not incidentally, enough to give him room for a politically palatable compromise on the question of federal funding. But last...
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