This is an amazingly exciting yet difficult week in America. In spite of strong faith-based opposition, our government, through the president, has removed the shackles that have almost brought federally funded scientific research on stem cells to a stand still in this country. Be clear: The use of stem cells holds more hope than promise. However, with government funding restarted, the scientific community believes that great and wondrous things may be possible, but it's all in the future.
That's what makes the past eight years so hard to swallow. How many families suffered unimaginable heartache caring for or burying loved ones who might have been helped by some discovery obtained in the research labs over most of the past decade? Don't get me wrong. I am not a believer in any magic silver bullet research that's going to cure diabetes in the short term. I know that the development and testing of new laboratory findings takes a long time, but eight years of a government's official policy of placing a straight jacket on research on stem cells is mindlessness bordering on malfeasance.
Many members of my church are opposed to the government's action reopening the funding grants for embryonic stem cell research. I have a fundamental faith in my church's doctrines on faith and morals, but I am less sure that the scientific scholarship of some of the faithful has an equivalent foundation. It is the burden for those with blind belief to live with the historical stain so justly earned and deserved through history for such ungodly foolishness as the condemnation of Galileo and other great scientific minds of the middle centuries.
Fortunately, my memories are fairly fresh but many are painful. I easily recall the vacant stares and visible terrors experienced by friends hopelessly lost in the fog of dementia and Alzheimer's. I have hugged loved ones who could not control the tremors and growing loss of their body's functions due to Parkinson's. I have had my heart broken seeing the visible ravages that signal the nearness of death in friends and acquaintances in the final stages of HIV/AIDS. Add to those my most personal recollections of family and lifetime friends who died from various forms of cancer or were condemned to a shortened life welded to a wheelchair because of spinal cord injuries.
Nobody is saying that these diseases and other disabilities of the body are all going to be cured by the scientific research that will now be unleashed in our nation's research universities, hospitals, and biomedical centers. Nevertheless, there is solid scientific reasoning and respected laboratory testing substantiating a universe of possibilities that suggest that stem cells may help end or curb some of these mysterious cripplers and killers of our young and old in the years ahead.
If this 21st Century is to fulfill its mantle of greatness as the Age of Possibilities, then the president's action this week in removing the handcuffs from scientific research into stem cells stands as one of best opportunities we have had in at least eight years to turn this beam of hope into burning ray of medical reality.
It won't be easy. Strong forces are allied against the stem cell research program. These are well-meaning people of fundamentalist beliefs powered on by religious fervor, not facts, and the belief that they are the frontline soldiers of God.
I do not denigrate or trivialize their religious zeal in fighting against something they believe is wrong. Similarly, all of the protests, parades, name-calling, pushing, shoving and sign swinging that is bound to occur for the television cameras cannot deter those of us who believe otherwise. We have read the literature, listened to the research scientists, and we know that the search for these desperately needed discoveries and cures may be made possible only with accelerated and federally funded stem cell research.
Thank you, Mr. President