The promise of Stem Cell research, in particular Embryonic Stem Cell research to solve many intractable diseases and conditions that plague our modern world to new possibilities like regrowth of nerve fibre for back injury patients to regrowth of the whole missing leg or arm.  This is what the anti-science US President George W Bush opposed last week, maintaining his loyalty to the anti-science religious fundamentalist right that holds sway in Washington andTexas these days.

Living as I do in Australia I see from time to time faint echoes here in the antipodes of the insanity that pervades US society.  Fortunately cooler heads prevail and it remains a faint echoe.  It is as if the same club is represented in the evolution vs creation debate as the anti-stem cell push in Washington.  Fortunately for us, the Republican Party is not monolithic, for we have the much maligned Governor of California funding a program as a stop gap measure until the Legislature comes to it's senses.

The conflict between science and religion is an arificial construction of this group that has gone all the way up to the Whitehouse. Let's hope th e US survives such an onslaught.  It's technological superiority and nuclear supremouse is increasingly being eroded by world events, so why allow a bad start in these new sciences and applications coming from biology?