On June 20, shortly after the U.S. Senate passed The Stem Cell Research Enhancement Act of 2007, President George W. Bush made good on his promise to veto the bill. Expanding federal funding of embryonic stem cell research, he said, would violate a moral boundary, “compelling American taxpayers to support the deliberate destruction of human embryos.” Standing alongside Bush in the White House when he explained his decision was a family whose daughter received a new bladder from adult bladder stem cells, a Stanford University ethicist who advocates alternatives to embryonic stem cells, and a Columbia University researcher trying to extract stem cells from “dead” embryos. Watching this scene on C-Span called to mind Ralph Waldo Emerson’s remark that society is ever divided between “two omnipresent parties of History, the party of the Past and the party of the Future.”

Today, many of our most devastating diseases derive from genetic defects that are not understood. While the Human Genome Project and the genomics revolution it spawned identified the 25,000 or so human genes, the role of genes in disease development (beyond several single-gene disorders like Tay-Sachs) is extremely difficult to study. Toward this end, the potential of embryonic stem cells to grow into any cell type, and precisely to replicate faulty genes, makes them powerful agents of discovery.

What discoveries will occur and how they will translate into medicine is, of course, a mystery. Research in a system as complex as human biology never proceeds in linear fashion. As a new book by Morton Meyers, Happy Accidents: Serendipity in Modern Medical Breakthroughs, reminds us, the essential nature of discovery is finding what we don’t expect. And even when we find something truly important, an invention’s full implications are typically unclear, and the problems of turning it into something useful are far greater than expected. The discovery in the early 1980s of monoclonal antibodies, for example, took 15 years to realize its promise to treat cancer and autoimmune disease. 

Since groundbreaking innovation is, at bottom, a creative act and, as such, unpredictable, we can only guess at the innovations to which stem cell science will eventually lead. But Louis Pasteur’s observation that “chance favors only the prepared mind” rings true. National polls indicate that two-thirds of Americans support congressional efforts to increase funding, the president’s fundamentally religious objections notwithstanding. Now it is incumbent on the party of the future, with all deliberate speed, to prepare minds to unriddle the anomalies and uncover the potential that stem cells present.