Well, the article does give you some tidbits on the matter. For the record, let me restate those.

Yes, Bush did sharply limit the funding for the research but he did not ban it right out. Basically, the reason was that he was trying to please both sides of the issue. The way that he did what he did pretty much failed to make either side happy.

So what are those sides? Well, that is not going to be defined anywhere nearly as easy as the scientists vs. the creationists. But allow me to take a stab at that for starters.

Against stem cell research: Yes, conservative Christians were probably the most vocal group against but there were also people who had concerns over the ethics and people who were just plain creped out over the idea of cloning people only to keep them alive but drugged into a coma until the body parts might be needed.

For stem cell research: Again, there were many people in the biological sciences who have been pro stem cell research. There have also been a large number of people who see themselves as potentially benefiting from the research due to any number of potential medical conditions and other people who were only on the band wagon because they figured that they are automatically required to be for anything that president Bush is against (what it was was of no importance, what mattered was that they didn't much care for Bush).

To my mind, what matters most is what real scientists can produce, potentially tempered by what potential ethicists don't have a fit over. But before we go into that, let's go back like 20 or so years and see where the science was back then.

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In the mid 80's, scientists were all about genetic therapy and all of the wonderful things that they were going to give us. Horrible diseases such as cancer, alzheimer's and diabetes would be a thing of the past. We would all live well past a hundred years and the world would generally be a really neat place to live. Mind you, such a prediction can now be seen as clearly over bold and back then, a sober assessment of matters should have shown this. Whatever, today, we have rice that provides vitamin E for the third world, petunias that bloom all summer and occasional recalls of food crops that are infected by crossing with strains that produce their own insecticides.

Now let's look at the world of ten years ago:

OK, now the biologists failed to deliver on what they clearly promised a decade earlier. But that was not their fault. If only they had been allowed to do as they pleased with as much money as they could suck down...if the Queen had balls, she would have been King.

“But this time we can do it. Just give us all an unlimited supply of money, no interference from anyone at all and pack of vague promises and the future will be what it ought to have been (by the way, we were wrong about the genetic thing...).”

So here comes Bush 43, with his wacky idea to cock block scientists and still creep out the other side. Well, the scientific community decided to make lemonade from the lemons that they had been thrown. And you know what? They have actually made quite a bit of progress in ways that will not be a huge problem for the other side.

Today, we can make stem cells from your own skin. They still are not quite as good as the ones that they can get from fertilized human eggs but they are able to do more with what they have developed today than what they suspected several years ago.

Also, it bears noting that the Bush 43 ban never affected animal stem cell research and that has clearly not progressed to anywhere near what was promised way back when despite having funding available. They still can't figure out how to prevent teeth from forming inside animals eyeballs and so on.

So if Obama does this, then I appreciate the gesture. Really, I do. But I have a suspicion that it may not turn out to be much more than a gesture.

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Also, it really bears noting that some of this technology has happened but not in ways that cause anyone to have the creeps. I really hope that nobody reading this ever gets in such a bad way that they need massive skin grafts but if they do, it will be with cloned infant foreskins. One foreskin makes like 20 acres of real human skin that does not trigger an immune response.