I caught a few minutes of Michael J. Fox on The Big Idea with Donny Deutsch on CNBC the other night.

Sigh. (Sorry, I do that a lot. The options are sigh or hit the TV or monitor. Sighing is more cost effective in the end.)

They were talking about stem cells and I just ask again: why can’t anyone talk about the promise of adult-stem-cell research? I would think Fox would especially want to. But he doesn’t, and so there’s a jumbled mess of a conversation in the public square. If he made the plunge (which seems so obvious to do), others would follow. Oprah would be talking about it! In a nutshell: We’d be getting somewhere, on many levels.

During the course of the Donny Deutsch conversation, a big joke was made that Bush has surrendered “the high ground” because he’s allowed research on some existing stem-cell lines. Like Romney has encountered in Massachusetts, any kind of middle ground from those who are trying to avoid full-scale embryonic-stem-cell research and cloning will not be well-received, because, the pro-escr/cloning (sorry, somatic cell nuclear transfer) is more radical than it is usually given credit for.