James Thomson, one of the researchers who published an extraordinary stem cell advance a few weeks ago—reprogramming skin cells into the equivalent of embryonic stem cells without embryos—has an op-ed in the Washington Post today, with Alan Leshner of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

They respond to Charles Krauthammer’s column from Friday (though I don’t think they understand his point), and argue that the recent advance, though it could well end the stem cell debate, does not vindicate President Bush’s approach to the subject. They express the hope that Congress will still override Bush’s veto of a bill to use taxpayer dollars to encourage the further destruction of embryos for research.

They evince a common misunderstanding of the Bush stem cell policy, arguing that it held back research, and therefore can’t be said to have been vindicated by a scientific advance, as if ethical arguments had simply nothing to do with the policy and politics involved.

Simply put, if there were no ethical problem with destroying human embryos for research, there would be no need for limits on taxpayer funding of the practice; so people who don’t think there is a problem don’t think there should be limits. But President Bush has argued there is a serious ethical problem, so there is a need for limits. The fact that the limits are limiting is not in itself an argument against them; that’s the point of limits. But the fact that they allow as much science to go forward as they do allow, is an argument in their favor, because it shows the policy is designed to balance science and ethics, and succeeds to some extent in doing so. He didn’t say no, he said yes provided certain protections are respected.

The message Bush has tried to deliver with his policies and speeches on stem cell research is that he does not think curtailing the destruction of embryos for research needs to mean preventing the development of stem cell science. “My Administration has sought to understand the dilemmas of stem cell research not as a choice between science and ethics, but as a challenge to advance medicine while meeting our solemn obligation to defend human life,” he said earlier this year.

Somatic cell reprogramming does seem to vindicate that view: it suggests it could be possible to do the work the scientists want without destroying human embryos, and that therefore (as Thomson himself told the New York Times), “a decade from now, [the stem cell wars] will be just a funny historical footnote.”

The political debate has an inertia all its own, and it’s not hard to imagine the intense pressure Thomson has been under from his friends in Washington to back away from his statements last week that this new finding would end the debate, and in time end the need to destroy embryos for research. But that doesn’t change what he said, and more importantly it doesn’t change what the success announced last month means.

It doesn’t mean President Bush caused all this to happen. As I suggested last month, I think that’s a complicated story. But it does mean Bush was right that it could happen without the government encouraging the destruction of human embryos if federal policy held firmly to the principle that human lives should not be destroyed for research—and so was right to hold firmly to that principle himself, and to encourage alternative avenues of research.