Biotech Brain Drain

[phantom power]

Sad on so many levels. Biotech is one of the few industries with serious potential for maintaining a growing high-tech economy. And we're flushing it down the toilet with our neo-know-nothing culture.

Fallout from the corruption of secular science by the Bush administration and its religious allies continues to pile up. The latest is a particularly harmful blow: Two of the world's best geneticists will leave the National Cancer Institute and move not to Stanford University, which had heavily recruited them, but to Singapore's Institute of Molecular and Cell Biology. The reason is simple: They will face far fewer restrictions on their research, which involves stem cells.

(...)

They're leaving the institute because of restrictions on the use of stem cells imposed by the Bush administration. They had hoped to move to Stanford to take advantage of the $3 billion fund California voters approved for stem-cell research that circumvents the federal restrictions. Unfortunately, lawsuits by antiabortion groups have held up use of those funds.

http://pharyngula.org/index/weblog/comments/signs_of_american_decline/

[BlueJazz]

1. Geez..This pisses me off on so many Levels...and the ironic thing is....

..years from now when the USA is at the bottom of the Research Pile, people will complain that "Our Schools are failing us"..Aggggg!!

[Tesha]

3. They will also complain: "Why didn't somebody *WARN* us???"

The complaints will be loudest from the sorts of yahoos now
trumpeting "Intelligent Design".

They, of course, will not see any connection between our loss
of the biosciences and their earlier actions.

Tesha

[NNadir]

2. This sort of thing is inevitable.

I note that religious restrictions put an end to the Italian preeminece in science in the 17th century.

Plus ca change...