On a Thursday afternoon earlier this year, Willy Lensch sat at his desk in the “nonpresidential” section of a seventh-floor laboratory at Children’s Hospital Boston and watched in dismay as one of the recent congressional debates about embryonic stem cell research streamed into his laptop. Employing the arch rhetoric that has typified stem cell politics since 1998, some members of Congress denounced the research because it requires the destruction of human embryos. Others trumpeted “alternative” techniques that promise the creation of embryonic stem cells without destroying embryos. Stem cell scientists like Lensch have heard it all before, and it never feels comfortable. “You feel the heat working on stem cells,” he said. “I’ve been working in labs for 20 years, and this is a different deal.”

Read more: Science That the Government Doesn’t Want to Exist — Discover Magazine

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