NY Times: Results of the stem cell ban: One million new jobs - in India.

[NNadir]

"LONDON — In 2001, President Bush restricted federal financing for stem cell research. The decision, which was shaped at least partly by the Republican Party's evangelical Christian base, and which disappointed many American scientists and businessmen, provoked joy in India. The weekly news magazine India Today, read mostly by the country's ambitious middle class, spoke of a "new pot of gold" for Indian science and businesses. "If Indians are smart," the magazine said, American qualms about stem cell research "can open an opportunity to march ahead."

Just four years later, this seems to have occurred. According to Ernst & Young's Global Biotechnology Report in 2004, Indian biotechnology companies are expected to grow tenfold in the next five years, creating more than a million jobs. With more than 10,000 highly trained and cheaply available scientists, the country is one of the leading biotechnology powers along with Korea, Singapore, China, Japan, Sweden, Britain and Israel.

A top Indian corporation, the Reliance Group, owns Reliance Life Sciences, which is trying to devise new treatments for diabetes and Parkinson's and Alzheimer's diseases, and create human skin, blood and replacement organs genetically matched to their intended recipients. Some scientists have even more ambitious ideas..."

It needs no comment other that theocracies don't do science.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/21/weekinreview/21mishra.html

[Old and In the Way]

1. The rest of the world will move forward as we become hamstrung

with the religious zealots who don't understand science, so therefore must be against it. Yet another example of why Republicans hate America.

[phantom power]

2. bio-tech might have been the Next Big Thing to drive our economy.

That and/or the massive project of switching to a non-fossil-fuel economy. But instead, we elected a passel of cretins who don't believe in either biotech, the end of oil, or climate change.