No Fireworks at Stem Cell Powwow

Carl Hall of the San Francisco Chronicle wrote a great piece about a stem cell powwow held at Stanford over the weekend.

Long-shot Texas gubernatorial candidate Chris Bell was there to support the science:

"I believe God wants us to use science and technology to help our fellow man," Bell told a friendly crowd Sunday in Palo Alto.

He was preaching to a choir of stem cell research advocates gathered for a two-day conference at Stanford University that was partly a pep rally and partly a strategy session for reincarnating California's Proposition 71 across the country.

But as Hall points out later, it's hard to muster any enthusiasm about embryonic stem cell research these days for whatever reason, be it the Hwang scandal or overshadowing concerns like the Iraq war and NSA wiretapping.

Green and other opponents of the controversial embryonic research weren't invited to the meeting at Stanford. But during interviews separately, they said they don't worry that stem cell fervor will sweep across the U.S. political landscape.

"Nobody really cares about this issue," said Dana Cody, executive director of the Life Legal Defense Foundation in Sacramento, a staunch critic of Prop. 71 involved in litigation that so far has blocked the California program's financing operations.

She blamed the 59 percent vote in favor of the stem cell initiative in 2004 on deceptive claims by the proponents and voter inattention.

"I don't think it's a big deal to most people – and I think that's unfortunate," she said.

Many of her ideological opponents at the Stanford conference said much the same thing, even though several in the crowd also spoke movingly from wheelchairs about their own stake in the debate.