Did the President Have a Polio Vaccination?

I only ask because the polio vaccine was developed using tissue from aborted fetuses.

Ronald Green the director of Dartmouth's Ethics Institute and chairman of Advanced Cell Technology's Ethics Advisory Board also testified before the senate subcommittee yesterday. He does a good job of using Bush's embryonic stem cell rationale against him:

It is not unique that the initial research needed to develop morally acceptable methods or materials does not meet everyone's approval, but this does not impugn the methods or materials produced as a result of that research. One example is the polio vaccines we use today. Some of the initial research on these vaccines was conducted with a technique that required the use of tissues from aborted fetuses. Later, this approach was replaced by other methods. Almost no one today refuses polio vaccination for their children on the grounds that they object to the methods used in the first experiments.

I would point out that even President Bush has been willing to use the harmless downstream results of research to which he objects. All of the stem cell lines being used in federally funded research today were produced by embryos that were destroyed for this purpose before the President's August 2001 directive. The President could have said that none of these lines should be used because they were created in a way he regards as morally objectionable. But he did not. He concluded that so long as no future harm is done, this valuable resource could be used.

By the way, Green says he has "no financial interest whatsoever in ACT's Technology."

He addressed the ethical issue raised by an anti-abortion minority that the embryos used in the experiment were actually destroyed. Presumably because he's an ethicist, not a scientist, he doesn't talk about allegations that ACT scientists didn't actually prove that stem cells could come from a single cell (which it still seems to me they did, but i'm not a scientist either). Still, Green frames the embryo-destruction point in a way that makes sense:

... there is the concern that the embryos used in this research did not survive the experiment. Since the publication of the Nature report some critics have emphasized this fact even though it remains true that the method developed by ACT scientists requires no further destruction of any embryos. I would like to point out that because this research was privately funded, this experiment was legal. It was also approved by ACT's Ethics Advisory Board and by an additional institutional review board that was mandated under Massachusetts law. The embryos used were donated by people who had fully consented to the research and understood, and even required, that the embryos would not be allowed to go on to further development.

Here's his complete testimony.