[Opinion] Red science vs. blue science
        
            By Ellen Goodman, 
                Seattle Times
             | 06. 16. 2007
        
                    
                                    
                    
                                                                                                                                    
                                                                            
                              
    
  
  
    
  
          
  
      
    
            BOSTON - By now you may be forgiven for suspecting that science is tinted - if not entirely tainted - by politics. The arguments over evolution and global warming alone are enough to make anyone believe that we have red and blue science as well as red and blue states.
  But nothing has been quite as polarizing over the past six years as the controversy over embryonic stem cells. Stem cells have been a defining issue even among politicians who can't define them.
  So it is no surprise to see a genuine, bona fide scientific breakthrough put through the political spin cycle. Last week, a trio of competing labs from Japan to Massachusetts rolled back the biological clock in mice and turned ordinary skin cells into the equivalent of embryonic stem cells. The research raised the possibility that we might eventually be able to make stem cells without destroying human embryos.
  This announcement came on the eve of a House vote to allow federally funded scientists to study cells from leftover frozen embryos at fertility clinics. And this disharmonic convergence...
 
       
 
  
 
    
    
  
   
                        
                                                                                
                 
                                                    
                            
                                  
    
  
  
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            Paula Amato & Shoukhrat Mitalipov
[OHSU News/Christine Torres Hicks]
On September 30th, a team of 21 scientists from Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU) published a significant paper in Nature Communications, with a scientifically accurate but, to many, somewhat abstruse headline:
Induction of experimental cell division to generate cells with reduced chromosome ploidy
The lead authors were Shoukhrat Mitalipov, recently described here as “a push-the-envelope biologist,” and his long-term colleague Paula Amato. (Recall that in July the pair had co-published with...