Brownback might be an fundie idiot, but he isn't wrong all the time. Embryonic stem cell research involves the deliberate destruction of human embryos. I don't give a toss what anyone says, legal opinions, feminists, anyone. This is where the fundies and Catholics are right, just for once.
I have a bit to do with big (and little) pharma. I have been inside medical research labs and many of my colleagues have worked in that field, one of them with the man who developed the anti-cervical cancer vaccine against one of the herpes viruses.
I have got an idea of how many mice they run through in the course of a research project that might take 10 or 20 years. You can equate that with embryos. Sure, some might be excess to requirements from IVF labs (and there are definite moral doubts about that too) but if the demand is great enough, embryos will be made for research purposes. They will also be cloned so that the response to any laboratory process will be uniform.
The eventual results will be profitable lines for some pharmaceutical companies, affordable only by the middle and higher classes of the USA and other western nations. The treatments will not be for malaria, sleeping sickness, AIDS or any third world disease, it will be for diseases of old age such as cancers, for which there are already treatments. Mostly sold to people in their 50s and much older who have had their lives.
The resources that go into this would be far better used in prevention of malaria, AIDS etc.
More power to him, as far as this goes.
