Playing the Doctor Card

The things we will do to curry favor with certain quarters:

Bill Frist, Senate majority leader and our politically ambitious neighbor to the south, has been hailed as a gifted physician. But the Harvard-educated, heart-lung transplant surgeon lost a lot of credibility in March when he misdiagnosed Terri Schiavo after watching some video clips. He said he didn’t believe she was in a persistent vegetative state. Doctors who had followed her case for years said otherwise, and an autopsy later confirmed that their diagnosis — not Sen. Frist’s — was right.

Now Sen. Frist is playing the doctor card again and risks losing even more credibility.

He has retreated from his eloquent words of four years ago, when he endorsed the promise of stem-cell science and urged colleagues to support it, even though that meant bucking “pro-life” orthodoxy.

Now he has adopted an alternative and fraudulent approach that President Bush and social conservatives might learn to love, but would continue to interfere with scientists’ stem-cell work. He wants senators to abandon the popular proposal to remove some existing restrictions and support instead a requirement that scientists get stem cells through techniques that, as Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, puts it, haven’t “been published in a single scientific journal” and haven’t “even cleared the peer review process (or) been tried in mice.”

Read the rest of the opinion piece.