In your August 30 edition, Michael Fumento discusses a very important issue in the Embryonic Stem Cell (ESC) Adult Stem Cell (ASC) debate, particularly, the promise of ASC research and the misperceptions about ESC potential. I would like to add a few points.  First, it is widely misunderstood that ESC research is outlawed in the US.  President Bush's veto refers only to the the use of federal funds for research on embryonic stem-cell lines created after August 2001.

Second, the American (and general public the world over) believe that the president's restrictions on federal funding of ESC research dampers its progress.  The fact of the matter is that even without hard evidence that ESC can be cultivated into viable tissues and cells for use in curative therapies, private donors are pouring funds into private institutions whose sole purpose is ESC research.  Stanford and Harvard Universities, as well as the University of Wisconsin-Madison, have all established institutes to this very end. Proponents of ESC research should concede, however, that despite all of this private funding, their attempts have been fruitless.  On the contrary, as Mr. Fumento notes, it is the ASC research that has yielded promising findings for a "measly" nine conditions.

Third, now that states are getting into the stem-cell-research game, American citizens will have the right to establish for themselves whether or not they want their state tax dollars paying for controversial -- and frankly, unpromising -- research on ESCs.  Both New Jersey and California have approved statewide initiatives to fund ESC research; it is only a matter of time before others follow suit.

Finally, recent media coverage of ESC researchers who have apparently developed a process to extract the necessary material from embryos without destroying them is promising and extremely important in this discussion. It disproves the contention that a lack of federal funding has hindered progress on the ESC front; in fact, it proves that federal funding really isn't even necessary in order for less invasive (and less controversial) methods of ESC research to be established!  It also provides the basis for precedent in ESC research.  If researchers guaranteed that their research would not routinely destroy embryos for the sake of unproven scientific ends, American citizens would have a lot less trouble offering federal funds to their objectives.