Who's muddled?
Richard Cohen writes in the Post today that Laura Bush is "muddled" in her stem-cell thoughts. But at the end of his column, he writes this of a friend who died of Parkinson's recently:

I recognized life in Milly -- oh, what gusto she once had! -- and I don't see it in the earliest of fetuses.

Promoters of embryonic stem cell research are fond of claiming that science is on their side, while opponents are relying on "faith" or "ideology" or some other synonym for "irrational prejudice." But Cohen gives us a perfect example of how backward that is. He is the one who appeals to our empathy, to our instinctive rejection of another's suffering - he appeals to our hearts, not our heads.

Look at an embryo in a microscope. It doesn't look or act anything like a person you pass on the street. Cohen's right about one thing - you don't see life or humanity in an embryo. There is nothing there to trigger our kinship reaction, our sense of empathy with another like ourselves. It does not look like anything except what it is - a tiny clump of undifferentiated cells. It's even a little unpleasant to look at.

And yet, we know for a scientific fact that we were once embryos. We can't remember it. Nobody directly watched us grow up from that stage. It sounds implausible. And it's irrefutable - you, Reader, were an embryo once, and only science tells us this. Science is how we know that the embryo is our kin, when our gut says "it's just a clump of cells". Scientists may be on Cohen's side, but science is not.
- posted by Scott @ 2:02 AM