Boston Globe vs. the New York Times - Who makes less sense on stem cells?

Matthew Eppinette of World's 2BHuman blog points me in the direction of this error filled editorial by the Boston Globe in favor of the embryonic stem cell research and human cloning.

A few highlights:

But by any reasonable definition, embryos at the earliest stage of development are not human beings,...

Hmmm.... They are organisms who have human parents and human DNA. Human beings sounds like a reasonable definition to me, experts in embryology and embryology textbooks. I guess the definition provided by science textbooks and experts in embryology isn't "reasonable" for the journalists of the Boston Globe.

Frist, a physician, knows that disease knows no delay, and stem cell treatment has the potential to alleviate much suffering.

I wonder if they would have pointed to Frist's medical expertise and opinion before he officially came out in favor of this bill. I also wonder why they didn't consult the expertise and opinion of Congressman Dave Weldon who also happens to be a medical doctor.

The bill focuses on the several hundred thousand embryos, byproducts of in vitro fertilization treatments, that are stored at fertility clinics. Each of these is an aggregation of several hundred cells at the most primitive stage of life.

These tiny entities will be destroyed eventually.

It's too bad the Boston Globe editorial staff can't do a brief amount of research before writing an editorial. Anyone who has done some basic research on embryonic stem cell research knows that the 400,000 embryos stored at in-vitro fertilization clinic will not all be "destroyed eventually." The vast majority of these embryos are being stored by their parents in the hopes of initiating a pregnancy in the future.

The saddest thing is that even Ellen Goodman, an editorial columnist for the Boston Globe, knows and has written about how most of the 400,00 embryos aren't slated to be destroyed. Did Ellen's memory fade from June of this year or did the editorial board not look for her opinion and expertise on this issue? Or did they mean to intentionally deceive?

South Korean researchers announced yesterday that they were prepared to provide American researchers with cloned stem cells. That generous offer should not be necessary in a nation with the intellectual resources of the United States.

So because we have intellectual resources that means we should be participating in the cloning of human beings for their stem cells? "Our guys are so smart they can clone and kill human beings faster than the Koreans. Who needs ethical limits? All nations with intellectual resources should be cloning and killing and have the taxpayers pay for it! Yee haw!!"

The federal government ought to provide the financial help to make the United States a leader in the field instead of allowing misguided objections to hold its scientists back

But the Globe makes no attempt in its editorial to argue why objections to killing and cloning human embryos are misguided. It's so much easier just to assert that the objections are misguided in conclusion, isn't it?