The New York Times reports on California’s $3 billion bond initiative for research that kills human embryos. John Broder and Andrew Pollack write, “This promising but ethically controversial field of biomedical research is now severely limited by the Bush administration’s policy restricting public money for research on embryonic stem cells.” Especially in the context of a state-funding initiative, that should be “restricting federal money.” But “severely limited” is a controverted statement and shouldn’t be presented as though it weren’t.

But that statement isn’t the biggest problem with the article. It’s that it accepts the claim that embryonic stem-cell research shows great promise in generating cures for Alzheimer’s–have these guys bothered to read Rick Weiss’s reporting in the Washington Post, which debunked that claim months ago?–and that the research could benefit “[h]alf of California families.” I assume that the bond-initiative advocates get that number the same way the Democrats generate the figure of 100 million Americans who could benefit from expanded federal funding for the research: by assuming that the research might lead to cures for cancer, heart disease, and the like, no matter how little evidence there is for these conclusions. (The Times ups this national figure to 125 million. At the present rate of growth, the number of Americans who will be said to gain substantial benefits from subsidizing the research will soon exceed the actual population of the country.) If the Times wants to quote someone making these laughable assertions, it should at least indicate that there are people who disagree (and have good reasons for disagreeing).