Big Biotech's Voracious Appetite

EVER SINCE President Bush limited federal funding of embryonic stem-cell research to existing cell lines, the mainstream media has obsessed about the perpetual political campaign to overturn his policy. But this is a mere dustup, a tempest in a teapot compared to the far more consequential story begging to be told of the radical and ambitious political agenda being pursued furiously by Big Biotech at the state level.

Back in those quaint old days of 2001, biotechnologists told us repeatedly that all they wanted for use in stem-cell research was access to leftover IVF embryos that were destined to be destroyed anyway. That gambit succeeded in getting a majority of Americans to support “embryonic stem-cell research.”