If you’re a medical researcher, you’re always competing for your share of charity dollars. The professional fund-raising class knows this. The pie of charitable giving (and taxpayer funding) isn’t particularly elastic. So a dollar that goes to AIDS treatment is a dollar that won’t be going to cancer research. It’s just the way it is.

That’s why charities behave the way they do. They pursue big donors with the ardor of a high school nerd who’s smitten by the head cheerleader. They put names on buildings for those who like a little ego-stroking. And they labor hard to convince the people with the bucks that their causes are worthy.

I’m not being judgmental about this; people who devote their lives’ work to raising money for worthy causes are definitely on the side of the angels. You’d certainly take them as a class compared to personal injury lawyers.

But they also have every incentive to put a hard sell on for their particular cause. The guy who comes in and says he’s going to make Christopher Reeve walk out of his wheelchair is likely to have a more compelling pitch than the guy who says he may someday be able to cure Diabetes in a lab rat.

AND THAT’S WHERE THE EXAGGERATED promise of the stem cell debate comes in. Virtually every doctor or researcher you talk to, and I’ve talked to a bunch, agrees that stem cell research holds out great promise for the future. It’s an avenue they’d love to see explored. It’s also a new science, and one that if it bears fruits, won’t likely do so for quite some time.

In the Cystic Fibrosis community (a genetic disease for which stem cell research has great promise), this debate rings some bells for those of us with long memories. In1989, the gene for Cystic Fibrosis was discovered. The thinking was that the guys in white jackets would soon figure out how to manipulate the gene into a normal healthy gene and we would all be cured. At the time, the typical estimate for completion of this project was five years. This caused much rejoicing.

Soon enough, CF was “cured” in a Petri dish. That meant scientists could say that they had the cure – they just had to figure out how to introduce it into the human body. It’s now been 17 years since the gene was discovered – the progress on genetic therapy has been minimal. Amazingly, the most promising treatment to come down the pike in that time has been the very recent and decidedly low-tech treatment of inhaling salt water. (I wrote about this treatment and its remarkable efficacy here.)

If it sounds like I’m blaming anyone or casting aspersions in anyone’s direction, I do so inadvertently. Virtually everyone who enters the field of medical research does so with the intention and the belief that they will accomplish great things. These people work tirelessly chasing lofty goals; they’re in it to save lives. They’re great people. My sole point is that in medical research, there’s nothing even close to a sure thing.

IT HAS BEEN THE EMBRYONIC STEM CELL research community’s great good fortune to have been turned into a political football. Were it not for the confluence of interests between stem cell researchers and a major political party, stem cell research would receive about as much mainstream media attention as gene therapy. Which is to say, none.

Pushed along by political interests who relish the chance to devalue the fetus, stem cell therapy has come to represent a panacea for the hopeless and the ignorant who understandably choose false hope over no hope. But, you have to wonder, what level of awareness do Michael J. Fox and Ronald Reagan Jr. have about the cause they so relentlessly tout?

Let’s take Parkinson ’s disease, a terrible affliction. The Parkinson Foundation doled out three “mega-project” grants this year. None were for stem cell research or anything related to stem cell research. If stem cell research were the be-all and end-all that its public proponents claim it to be, why would that be the case? Regarding the value of stem cell research, the Parkinson Foundation has voted with its wallet.

Or let’s take Alzheimer’s, another disease often sited as one of the low hanging fruits that will be imminently solved by a embryonic stem cells. The Alzheimer’s Foundation website unequivocally states the following:

While some researchers believe stem cell research may one day help people with Alzheimer's disease, they generally feel that such a day is far off in the future. Several issues complicate the applicability of stem cell treatments to Alzheimer’s.

If you review the Alzheimer Foundation’s report of treatment and research breakthroughs in 2005, you’ll see that there were many positive developments, none of which had a blessed thing to do with embryonic stem cell research.

YESTERDAY HUGH AND PROFESSOR REYNOLDS pointed to a development whereby the stem cells could be harvested from an embryo without destroying the embryo. They both asked, “Debate over?”

I thought back to a piece I had done for the Weekly Standard over a year ago on embryonic stem cell research. In putting together the piece, I interviewed Dr. William Hurlbut of Stanford. Hurlbut had developed a way to create stem cells without actually creating a living organism like an embryo. He compared the thing he created to a model airplane without the glue – it would lack the cellular coherence to be an actual living organism. In Hurlbut’s work, the cells truly would be inarguably nothing more than a collection of cells.

So Hurlbut’s work got some coverage in the Weekly Standard, in Wired Magazine and it was talked up by Mitt Romney. But it never gripped the imagination of either the general public or made a dent on the mainstream media’s rock-like consciousness. The reason for that was simple – heartless conservatives standing athwart medical miracles yelling “Stop!” made a much more compelling narrative for the Democratic Party than the dreary decades-long work required to actually achieve a medical “miracle.”

Don’t look for the stem-cell research community, especially its fund-raising arm, to loudly tout the new development that Hugh and Glenn pointed to yesterday. If this new science becomes widespread knowledge, stem-cell research will have to win scarce dollars on scientific merit rather than political merit. Without disparaging the potential of stem cell treatments, that will be much harder. If stem cell research is no longer a political issue, stem cell champions of the moment like John Edwards will cease peddling pernicious lies like the one he offered about Christopher Reeve.

And without credentialed cretins like John Edwards promising miracles, sufferers (and potential sufferers) of all sorts of diseases will have to deal with their reality instead of breathlessly awaiting a miracle that they believe is imminent but that is, at best, far away.

Complaints? Compliments? Contact me at Soxblog@aol.com.