Christopher Reeve spoke at the American Society of Cell Biology's annual meeting a couple of years ago. It was moving, partly from the substance of what he said, but also partly from the obvious physical exertion it took him to complete a sentence. He would get through a phrase, gasp air, pause, and go on to the next.
He made the case for stem cell research extraordinarily strongly and persuasively. He did not equivocate, did not consider the purported 'cost' of destroying frozen few-cell embryos which will never be allowed to develop otherwise. He simply said, there is no choice. If you go into a burning room, and there is an 80-year-old man with Parkinson's disease in one corner, a dish of cells in another corner, the room is filling with smoke, who do you save? We know in our hearts what is 'life.'
He also said some things I strongly disagreed with - he told us, a group of basic researchers, that at the end of each day we should ask ourselves, did I do something at the bench today that will benefit human health? And if the answer is no, then we should reconsider what we're doing. Reeve advocated forcefully for biomedical research, and pushed non-disease-driven research - basic science - to the side. But his voice was a strong one, a clear one, and he drew policmakers' attention to the needs of sending more money, in a general way, to science.
I know this diary should have been made instead as a comment on the main page posting, but I wanted to post it separately rather than as #196 in a long string of comments about how the media and Bush campaign will 'spin' Reeve's death. (A ghoulish topic to turn to so quickly.)
Let this diary be for discussion of Reeve the man, rather than Reeve the meme, and for discussion of science funding, rather than stem cell wedge issue polling. For a change.