President Barack Obama’s speech lifting restrictions on federal funding for human embryonic stem cell research was characteristically eloquent and was widely applauded amongst scientists. But as a number of bioethicists and journalists quickly pointed out, when he blasted opposition to stem cell research as ideological, he was on very shaky ground.

The President promised that his administration, unlike his predecessor’s, would "make scientific decisions based on facts, not ideology". The take-home message was that he would not hedge science around with Republican bans, prescriptions and prohibitions. And Harold Varmus, co-chairman of the president's scientific advisory council, observed that the president would rely on "sound scientific practice... instead of dogma in developing federal policy."

But even strong supporters of stem cell research shook their heads over handing a blank cheque to scientists. One of America’s leading bioethicists, Daniel Callahan, of The Hastings Center, a non-political bioethics thinktank, wrote that "everyone would do well to recognize that there is a fundamental difference between ethics and science. That difference has been systematically obscured by the widespread argument of research proponents that opposition to the research is opposition to science."

And even Wired’s science writer, Brandon Keim, pointed out that "President Bush's stem cell policy may have been restrictive and misguided, but it wasn't anti-science." In the Chicago Tribune, columnist Steve Chapman pointed out that "Science can tell us how to build a nuclear weapon. But science can't tell us whether we should use it. Just because research may be useful in combating disease doesn't mean it's ethically acceptable."

And Charles Krauthammer, a columnist for the Washington Post and a member of the Bush-appointed President’s Council on Bioethics, scathingly recalled scientific experiments which were clearly unethical. "How anyone as sophisticated as Obama can believe this within living memory of Mengele and Tuskegee and the fake (and coercive) South Korean stem cell research is hard to fathom."