Rush Limbaugh is a Jerk

[pegkerr]

Here is Michael J. Fox's ad on stem cell research, which is very powerful.

[Error: unknown template video]

 

Rush Limbaugh mocked him, saying that he was faking it. He was speedily informed by Parkinsons experts that he was dead wrong, and was forced to apologize. Then he attacked Michael J. Fox with a different critique: "Michael J. Fox is allowing his illness to be exploited and in the process is shilling for a Democratic politician." Good lord, but that man is a waste of oxygen. (Limbaugh, not Fox. Obviously.)

Comments

[diatryma.livejournal.com]

The problem with denying federal funding is that many buildings are paid for with it-- so in order to use state money, scientists have to build new facilities, buy new equipment, keep all of it separate from existing money... and that's difficult. Denying federal funding also restricts federal oversight and could cause some patent issues-- I don't trust a pharmaceutical company to use the knowledge as well as the squabbling scientific community as a whole. And if the research is done privately, the knowledge may not be spread around as much for fear of being scooped and losing a lucrative patent.

Most of these views come from an old bio professor, who is, I will admit, curmudgeonly and All-Knowing. But I'm a big fan of public funding for science, not least because that's paying my rent.

[joelrosenberg.livejournal.com]

Sure; we all find good reasons for what pays our own mortgages. But there's finite federal bucks available for science, and a huge amount of the apportionment has more to do with politics than science -- what's the multiple of what's spent on diabetes research that's spent on AIDS research? -- and I doubt that anybody's shocked, shocked that it's going on.

That said, I'm not sure why federal money spent on an expansion of lines of embryonic stem cell research needs to be US federal money spent on an expansion of lines of embryonic stem cell research, or why it shouldn't.