Novak wrote it in his column!!! It's not reported by some other source.

This amuses me. Thank you for confirming that your previous comment - that Novak got his information elsewhere and only confirmed it from the administration - was utter nonsense.

And Plame was not a "covert agent," as has been proved by a lack of charges on that count in the Fitzgerald investigation.

Plame was a covert agent, as proven by the fact that an investigation was asked for by the CIA in the first place. Being unable to prove a charge does not mean the crime was not committed - however, nobody investigates an action that isn't a crime in the first place.

Adult stem cell research has shown amazing progress, but the differnces between adult stem cells and fetal stem cells is as great as the differnces between an adult and a fetus.

True, but the difference is that fetal cells have been far better suited to medicine.

If a scientist could show me a mouse cured by mouse fetal stem cells, or a monkey, or an ape, then I would say this research must go forward...

Great! Welcome to fetal stem cell advocacy.

McDonald, J.W., et al. 1999. Transplanted embryonic stem cells survive, differentiate and promote recovery in injured rat spinal cord. Nature Medicine 5(December):1410-1412. Abstract available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/70986.

However similar results have been shown with adult cell lines as well

It took seven more years to accomplish what was already done in 1999 using fetal cells.

I am still open to the science on this...

Why should I, or anybody else, believe that? When you found out the science doesn't match your claim, instead of making good on your promise, you moved the goalposts. Why should anybody think that you're not simply going to keep shifting your stance, no matter how conclusive the evidence is? We've seen it in global warming (which dates to, what, the 70's?), and we've seen it in evolution (creationism, no, intelligent design). Any science can be attacked from the angle of "we don't know EVERYTHING yet".

Now as an aside, this is all really a moot point as the FDA has approved the use of fetal stem cells as a treatment:

That's a gross mis-characterization of what you linked to; a phase I clinical - i.e. safety - trial is hardly "FDA approved...as a treatment". But tell me, do you remember claiming earlier today that fetal cell treatment was totally unproven? Now you're arguing that it is? That's precisely the sort of slippery "my position never changes but my stance and argument does" that demonstrates a lack of the openness you claim.

...but I think there is more potential in getting adult cells to behave like stem cells, than to get stem cells to behave like the adult cells we want.

Potential is a slippery concept. We don't have any capacity to make adult cells into stem cells right now except for cloning - at which point you have embryonic stem cells. We probably eventually will, but we don't really have the foggiest notion of how to even begin. Meanwhile, making fetal stem cells into adult cells has been done for many years. The signal list is vastly incomplete - yanking the funding didn't exactly help - but it's mostly a matter of research for each case, research which will also help our knowledge of any number of developmental disorders. In contrast, there are adult cells for which adult stem cells are as yet unknown, impractical to harvest, or otherwise simply unavailable.

...perhaps whether or not the federal government needs to fund it.

The federal government should primarily interest itself in funding basic research, stuff that helps lots of researchers without necessarily being so close to a useful product. Fetal stem cell research fits that bill quite well. There is a large amount of "pure" research that still needs to be done, and that's best done as a collective than as a private, proprietary product which only one company will be able to profit from - IF it can afford to make the outlay in the first place.

It's only much more recently, as commercial interests have overwhelmed science and medicine, that sharing has become verboten.

That's overstating things, IMO. Newton supposedly kept calculus under wraps for almost two decades until Leibniz published separately. Competition in science for status and prestige was rampant long before capitalism made the link to direct monetary profit more obvious, and part of that competition has always taken the form of keeping key breakthroughs secret at least until publication.

What commercial interests have done is made "publication" the less direct and less profitable goal in some sciences, especially medicine. While a published study is expected to be replicable by any qualified scientist in the field - and if profound, it's not even really considered credible until it HAS been replicated, e.g. cold fusion - studies for the FDA are kept largely under wraps ad infinitum, and only shown to government agencies with a need to know.

In academic circles, which generally rely on grants such as Gates', keeping things under wraps until publication is and has pretty much always been a standard procedure. I admire Gates' initiative in this matter; I do suspect, as another letter writer alluded to, that the idea came to him from the experience of managing a not-small software corporation. I've seen in my own job that disparate elements of the same large company do not always work together willingly, preferring to compete amongst each other for finite resources and funding rather than cooperating for the good of the whole.

You know that part where the women of Salon supposedly glorified and supported women buying younger men? Yeah, what you're all talking about here? What you're claiming they said, they didn't. Seriously.