Bob Park Speaks
Herewith two items from Bob Park's What's New, issue for Friday, 6 July 2007:
2. SCIENCE ADVICE NOW: GEORGE W. BUSH IS LOOKING FOR ANSWERS.
A front-page story by Peter Brown in the Washington Post on Monday says the meetings are never listed on the president’s public schedule, and remain unknown to many on his staff, but Bush is summoning "leading authors, historians, philosophers and theologians to the White House." He is searching for answers to the collapse of his presidency but scientists were not consulted. Perhaps it was an oversight by the writer, but it may explain the number of terminally stupid Bush programs that could have been averted by checking with freshman science students. They could have told him: 1) Not even Dick Cheney can break The First Law of Thermodynamics – hydrogen is not an energy source and for that matter neither is corn ethanol. 2) Ballistic missiles are easier to make than they are to stop. 3) Because the sexual urge, even of presidents, is shaped by evolution to insure procreation – girls under 18 need access to Plan B. 4) Embryonic stem cells are not one-celled people – the "soul" is an ancient superstition with no legal standing.3. EMBRYONIC STEM CELLS: WHY NOT ASK INFERTILITY PATIENTS?
A survey of patients at major infertility centers, reported in today’s Science, did just that. In contrast to the prevailing view, they found that only 22% would even consider donating excess frozen embryos to other couples. Most patient couples prefer that their excess embryos be used for research, and if not needed for that, simply destroyed.