Michael Fumento
2009-11-01
July 15, 2009 — An age of medical miracles is dawning. Obama administration federal funding rules for embryonic stem cells, or ES cells, will open wide the money floodgates for "the most remarkable potential of any scientific discovery ever made with respect to human health." It has "the capacity to cure maladies of all sorts, including cancer, heart disease, Parkinson's, Alzheimer's," and spinal cord injuries. Or so says Sen. Arlen Specter (D-Pa.) among others.
But quadriplegics probably shouldn't sign up for the New York City Marathon just yet. If these cures are just around the corner, this corner is far, far away. And that's according to ES cell researchers and funding advocates themselves. The time frame for the first of those miracles seems routinely to be given as a "decade," as in "a decade away" or "a decade off." And it keeps shifting.
Thus it appeared in a 1998 newswire article heralding the creation of the first human ES cell culture in James Thomson's University of Wisconsin lab. Thomson and his fellow researchers "warn that such clinical applications are perhaps as much as a decade away," said the article. Perhaps as much? Check your calendar. Addressing a 2007 Wisconsin convention nine years later, Thomson articulated that the time frame had shifted to "decades away," plural.