Why fundamentalist Christianity is going to leave us in the scientific dust

When all science has to be approved by the Bible thumpers, there will be no science. Do we really want to cede breakthroughs like this to the rest of the world because a few Bible-thumpers want us to revert to the 13th century?

A team of South Korean scientists announced yesterday that they have discovered a highly efficient way to clone human cells, an advance that could alter the scientific and political debate over the procedure

The researchers said they have created 11 new lines of cloned human embryonic stem cells, including, for the first time, two that are genetically matched to patients with a disease. This is the first step necessary for therapeutic cloning, a procedure in which patients might one day be treated with healthy nerve, blood, or other cells cloned from their own skin. The two disease-carrying cell lines, cloned from patients with juvenile diabetes and an inherited blood disorder, will offer researchers new ways of studying those maladies.

But the most immediate impact of the work, scientists said, was to establish the cloning of human cells as a robust, surprisingly reliable procedure. The team, led by Woo Suk Hwang at Seoul National University, for the first time cloned skin cells from men and from patients with a wide range of ages, from 2 to 56. The South Koreans announced the first successful cloning of human cells last year, but it required 242 egg cells, which are used to make microscopic embryos, to create a single batch, or ''line," of cells. By refining its laboratory techniques, the team made 11 new lines of embryonic stem cells using only 185 egg cells, more than a 10-fold improvement in efficiency.

''This is a very important paper," said Douglas Melton, a Harvard University biologist who is preparing an effort to clone human cells. ''I am very impressed by the speed with which they have done this."

Critics of cloning research have argued that treating patients will require large numbers of women to donate eggs, and egg donation carries some risk. The paper, published online yesterday by the journal Science, may dampen this concern, because the new research shows it is often possible to create a line of cloned embryonic stem cells using only the eggs gathered from a single cycle of fertility treatment in one woman. But the advances are likely to intensify another concern about the science: That the United States is falling increasingly behind.

''We are going to be playing catch-up," said Kevin Eggan, a Harvard scientist who works with Melton and who recently visited the South Korean team. ''They are the masters."

Embryonic stem cell research in the United States has been slowed by a political fight with roots in the abortion debate. Some critics of the research charge that destroying a human embryo, which researchers do to create embryonic stem cells, means taking a human life. On Aug. 9, 2001, President Bush announced that the government would not fund research using human embryonic stem cells created after that date, because he did not want the government to encourage embryo destruction. The new cell lines in South Korea, which were created with money from the government there, fall under that ban, but American scientists could study them using private funds or, in some places, state money.

I'm no scientist, and usually science news makes me glaze over, but even I can see that anyone who is truly "pro-life" should be applauding research like this. Imagine being able to cure diseases like juvenile diabetes, many congenital defects, problem heart valves, and other diseases, without dealing with organ rejection.

Because this research uses donor EGGS only, the fundie lunatics are trying to couch this in terms of the risks and discomfort of egg donation -- as if they are so concerned for the comfort and safety of women. Yet they don't seem to mind donor eggs used in fertility treatment.

It's easy to laugh at the ridiculousness of having a second Scopes trial, this time in Kansas, in the 21st century. But the blow to scientific research that a Bible-based society is going to deal is something we all ought to think about before continuing to vote in people like Bill Frist and Tom DeLay. Surely stopping a couple of gay guys they never met from marrying isn't worth the human lives that will be lost waiting for research that never happens here.