Jonathan Alter, My Hero

In his Newsweek column this week, Jonathan Alter, himself a cancer survivor and one who might have derived much more benefit from embryonic stem cell-based therapy than from the adult stem cell therapy he received (which was itself studied in embryos), rants against the Bush policy on stem cells. He makes the case that those who work against stem cell research in Congress will have a big hole to climb out of in the next election. And, more than any mainstream columnist so far, he identifies a new phenomenon, the "stem cell extremist," as a source of the intractable political debate:

Bioethical blowhard Leon Kass of the University of Chicago conned Bush into seeing the issue as morally complex, but the rest of the world understands that it's simple enough—reproductive cloning (to create Frankensteins), no; embryonic-stem-cell research (to cure diseases), yes. (The phrase "therapeutic cloning" should be retired.) Enshrining this basic distinction in law is a better bulwark against the "slippery slope" problem than hair-splitting limitations. Most nations understand this. Only Bush bitter-enders and the pope are in the perverse position of valuing the life of an ailing human being less than that of a tiny clump of cells no bigger than the period at the end of this sentence.