What was that sound last week when the Great Stem Cell Debate of the 21st Century fizzled into nothing?

It certainly wasn’t very noisy. It wasn’t people celebrating the fact that we now have one less thing to fight about. In fact it almost seemed like the opposite. It was the murmuring anger of the schoolyard brawler who has no reason to scuffle anymore and yet still stalks the quad with his fists clenched and the vein standing out in his neck.

You would think that perhaps we had come to one of those rare moments when two great armies could put down their weapons and shake hands. Research out of the Far East reveals [1] that—hallelujah!—we don’t need embryonic stem cells after all. Plain old skin cells can be used to accomplish the same purpose. Whew! Battle concluded. Everyone gets what they wanted. Research will be sanctioned. Embryos will be undisturbed. Diseases will be cured.

So why does it feel so tense in the room? Why is nobody using the term win-win? The New York Times felt so compelled to make it clear that President Bush is still an idiot that it devoted a long editorial [2] to explaining how his “moral stance” on the stem cell issue was not moral at all and any claims that he contributed to the new research are “far-fetched.” On the other side we have Embryo Worshippers invoking the Almighty, claiming victory over a scientific elite that would have raged like serial killers through the deep freezes of fertility clinics worldwide had the faithful not stood firm.

The fact of the matter is that most people—I would say 98 percent of us—were always somewhere in the middle on this issue. You don’t have to be a froth-mouth inerrantist from Cahokia to imagine that monkeying around with a three-day-old blastocyst—available only from a woman’s fertilized egg—might result in a science fiction plot. The guy who discovered stem cell research [3] said as much—something to the effect of “it would be strange if you weren’t a little bothered by this.”

On the other hand, it seems a crime not to use the embryos at all, if the result of the research might be cures for quadriplegia (we know this because John Edwards told us [4], “If John Kerry is elected, Christopher Reeve will walk again”), or cancer, or Alzheimer’s disease.

Given this quandary, a reasonable person might say, “Okay, let’s do it, but let’s go slow and let’s be careful.”

This is what President Bush did in August of 2001 [5]. He tried to compromise. He didn’t ban the research, but he didn’t authorize it for any stem-cell lines that had yet to be created. He was essentially preventing any profit-seeking entity from creating embryonic stem-cell lines specifically for this purpose. Regardless of whether you believe that a 150-cell embryo is or is not a human being, that seems a way out, especially since scientists confirmed that they did have enough cells to work with.

Conservatives and liberals were both disappointed by that decision. But over the past six years, new stem-cell research facilities have sprung up all over the lot, and in some cases they’ve been sponsored by states instead of the federal government. (California’s project is especially ambitious.) So the work went on, and now the work has been made just a little bit easier.

Shouldn’t we all have a glass of champagne? Or at least half the room have champagne and the other half apple juice? Shouldn’t somebody say, “Yeah, that book I wrote in 2005 maybe overstated the case a little bit”? “Yeah, that speech I made at the National Press Club—whoo boy, what was I thinking?”

No?

You guys are unbelievable.