How a 20-gram rodent conquered the world of science

The following is the beginning of my new article in the December Harper's, which is generating a lot of response already. I was asked onto the Colbert Report ( which I declined, much to the chagrin of certain younger members of the family), and I have been called "some sort of PETA" type, (which I am not). To read the whole thing you will have to get the magazine, on newsstands now. It is worth it because you can also see the eery art by Adam Stennett they used with it.

This past June, while Americans spun in a daze of war, bad summer movies, and weird weather, a mouse hijacked American science policy.

It was, for George W. Bush, a rare piece of luck.  Just when the political ground on stem-cell research seemed to be shifting beneath his feet, with some of his own hard-line advisers on the topic starting to soften to political realities, a leading scientific journal announced what only a few years ago would have been thought absurd: it was possible to make stem cells without using an embryo.

Japanese scientists had achieved the result with pure laboratory chutzpah. They used a bunch of viruses to insert genes that make cells “pluripotent” into the skin cells of an adult mouse, thereby transforming them into new stem cells, which were used to grow new mouse skin and organ tissue.

“Scientific advances like this one,” the president intoned, bobbing his head in a gesture to the cancer survivors up on the dais with him that day, “are important and should give us hope that there’s a better way forward than scientific advances that require the destruction of a human life.”

And that, the president went on, was why he would veto any attempt to expand access to human embryonic stem cells. A mouse had come to the rescue. Never mind that the viruses used to stick the genes into the cells had caused cancer in a number of the mice, or that, compared with the human embryo–driven stem-cell techniques that already show likely treatments for the cruelest of diseases, the mouse method was still in its infancy. No, the mouse breakthrough, as a

Los Angeles Times headline writer put it, “may put ethical concerns to rest.”

That a 20-gram rodent could lay to rest one of our most divisive medical/ethics debates might strike a visitor from Neptune as being a bit odd, but that alien visitor would quickly go native were he to spend some time acquainting himself with the practices of the modern research laboratory.

There he would discover that the mighty mouse is king. He would find, for example...