Just once, I wish we could have a debate over an important political issue that wasn’t entirely shaped and determined by sheer stupidity and ignorance from the right wing. Today will not be that day.

The winger blogs are all a-twitter over a story noting that the Omnibus Budget bill that was (finally) just passed contains a provision – known as the Dickey-Wicker Amendment, which the religious wingers have stuck in every budget since 1996 – prohibiting federal funding for research “in which human embryos are created, destroyed, discarded, or knowingly be subjected to risk of injury or death”. Setting some kind of a record for intellectual incompetence, the right-wing CNSNews mis-reported this as “Obama Signs Law Banning Federal Embryo Research Two Days After Signing Executive Order to OK It” – which, in one single sentence, misrepresents the event (he did not sign a law on embryo research, he signed the budget bill, which contained one small amemendment addressing embryonic research among its reported 3,500 pages of text and appendices), false as to fact (his executive order did not address embryo research), and completely wrong in its implication (the budget amendment does not undo the research policy Obama announced, as this headline implies). Despite this falsity and confusion, the event is viewed as some sort of humiliation for, or hypocrisy by, President Obama, since he had made a point of repealing the Bush ban on stem-cell research funding just two days before signing the budget with its unrelated embryo-research amendment. Much chortling and back-slapping is now underway, among people who know nothing about the issue and are apparently too dumb to read.

Yes, certainly the Dickey-Wicker ban is stupid, anti-science and anti-intellectual, and annoying. But it does not undo the policy that Obama overturned, and which Bush had previously implemented. (This much should have been obvious, even to the wingers, and even without reading: since the Dickey-Wicker Amendment predated Bush’s policy by almost 6 years, there would obviously have been no need for that policy, or the immensely divisive fight over it, if they merely did the same thing, right?) In fact, it’s effect is quite small, and easily evaded, and is aimed at an entirely different scientific procedure than the one addressed by Obama’s recent policy statement – not that anyone in the right-wing monkey cage seems to know that.

The Bush policy went far beyond the Dickey-Wicker amendment. It prohibited funding for any lab working on human embryonic stem cells in any way, other than research using a small number of specifically authorized cell lines. It meant that labs recieving any federal funding could not do any research on the prohibited cell lines (i.e., virtually all of them), even if the funding for that research was provided by another source. They could not even use the same labs and equipment – they had to build a completely separate facility to do the work, which obviously was prohibitively expensive. Since almost all research labs receive federal funding of some sort, the policy was intended to – and in large part did – completely shut down almost all stem-cell research regardless of funding source.

The Dickey-Wicker Amendment banned funding for reseach conducted on embryos themselves. This includes the process of creating stem cell lines for further research, since the stem cells are taken out of an unused, non-implanted IVF embryo, but it does not prohibit “stem-cell research”, that is, the use of stem cells themselves, not the embryos they were taken from. (A stem-cell “line” is a continuously-maintained collection of cells in laboratory flasks, transfered periodically to new flasks as they divide and grow. It’s one of the unique properties of stem cells that they can be grown permanently in this way, unlike most other body tissues. The line is created by taking stem cells out of an embryo, but that only has to be done once for each new line; after that, it’s just the individual cells themselves that are grown – they do not form embryos, and could not be implanted to create a pregnancy, while they are growing in the culture medium. “Stem-cell research” uses these separated cells, not developing embryos.) Dickey-Wicker has always been interpreted as permitting funding for stem-cell research, but not for the creation of new lines of cells. Scientists accommodated this by using private funding to generate cell lines, and federal funding for research on the cells. Bush not only banned that, but imposed restrictions on the usage of existing cell lines that choked off vast amounts of ongoing research.

Dickey-Wicker is a bad policy, because the federal government is the source of the majority of basic-science funding, but it doesn’t actually prohibit stem-cell research. The combined effect of the repeal of the Bush ban and the re-authorization of Dickey-Wicker is to restore the situation before Bush meddled with it, and to free up every qualified lab in the country to do embryonic stem-cell research using any cell lines available – instead of just those that can afford to build wasteful, redundant facilities. And, since the cell lines on which Bush did permit research were maintained in a growth medium that cannot safely be injected into a human body, they could not be used to develop clinical treatments as the research progressed. Obama’s policy change removes that barrier.

Note, finally, that it was Bush‘s policy that was criticized as hypocritical – both by left- and right-wingers – because it inisted on prohibiting large amounts of research for the supposed reason that doing so with the products of destroyed embryos was somehow immoral, but at the same time explicitly authorized doing exactly that thing on a small number of specifically-designated lines that were in no way different in origin from the many others that were excluded. It was clearly just an awkward and stupid political compromise that carried no moral conviction – but it bottlenecked a major scientific field for most of a decade.

It would be much better to repeal both the Bush and Dickey-Wicker anti-science policies, but even so, Obama’s reversal is a huge step forward. He is hardly at fault for being unable to also remove a stupid amendment has been stuck into the budget bill by winger cranks for over a decade now. As was Clinton before him, he is in no position to hold up the entire government budget over one minor issue. Like the anti-choice Hyde Amendment, and other idiosyncratic policies, Dickey-Wicker was forced into the budget bill – one of the few bills the president simply can’t veto – because a small number of extremists are willing to crash the government, and the larger number of practical public servants can’t let them do it. But it’s hardly a humiliation, except for the wingnuts who put it there. And its reauthorization, backward as it is, in no way undoes the great good Obama has done with his previous pro-science decision.

Crossposted to Lean Left, the political blog I contribute to, because I’m shameless taking advantage of the fact that Lean Left is aggregated at Memorandum and SufScrup is not.