For ethical stem-cell research.(PUBLIC POLICY)

AMAJORITY of senators has voted to get the federal government, for the first time, in the business of killing human embryos for research purposes. By the time you read this, President Bush will have vetoed the bill, and won enough votes in Congress to sustain his veto. We wish that the president had not waited so long to cast his first veto, but for his maiden effort he has picked a bill that richly deserved one.

In 2001, Bush announced that the government would fund research on existing stem-cell lines. He did not, however, want federal funds to encourage anyone to kill human embryos to derive more stem-cell lines. He thus refused to fund research on stem-cell lines derived after the funding was announced. The Senate voted to lift this restriction. The bill would permit funding on stem-cell lines derived from "leftover" human embryos at fertility clinics.

Even if the bill were ever to become law--which it will not as long as this president is in office--it would not accomplish much. Science might progress a little faster. But it is pretty clear that research using cloned human embryos and fetuses has more to offer than research using the embryos at fertility clinics. That type of research cloning is still unpopular. The political point of the current bill is thus to pave the way for it.

There are also other, ethical scientific alternatives that hold more promise. A second bill would fund research that seeks to develop ways of producing the equivalent of embryonic stem cells without killing human embryos. Such research would be in addition to ongoing, federally funded research on stem cells taken from adults' tissues and from ...