And if people don't buy the bread, you'd rather it be discarded than given to the hungry?
By your own implication ("not nearly to the extent needed"), embryos are discarded. That is occurring...it's a fact. And given that end, or the alternative (participation in research), the RCC chooses against the latter.
And why are they apparently lacking that good-ol' can-do spirit, that entrepreneurial enthusiasm?
Perhaps because there's funding available elsewhere.
"[...] those transplantation therapies should work but it's likely to take a long time." --James Thomson, pointing out the promise of the research path.
"[...] be holding quite the promise that we desperately hope they will." --Lord Winston, downplaying hopes, but not saying they won't be helpful.
Bottom line: private investment money for ESCR has been, at best, a trickle because of the remoteness of the possibility that it will ever pay off. Because as I said, after millions of dollars spent and cutting-edge experiments on 5 continents, all it's been able to produce in vivo is tumors.
That claim is demonstrably false, but I have no reason to believe you will stop using it even if I falsify it again. However, any honest third party can do a Google search and see that you're wrong.
But I repeat myself.
Yes, you do...despite being wrong.
Embryos are not remotely analogous to bread because they are persons, not physical resources. But let's instead use the analogy of looted antiquities (goods which, like human embryos, are of incommensurable value but were wrongly obtained to begin with.) You can't exchange - trade - barter - sell looted antiquities because it is unethical as well as illegal to receive remuneration or to profit from them. The sense of this is that if profit is allowed to occur, it creates a perverse incentive to go out and loot some more.
The analogy works, but is imperfect, chiefly because embryos have, intrinsically, a far higer ontological status than antiquities. They cannot be treated as YOUR property, a RESEARCHER's property, or anybody's property, because they are not property at all. They are human beings; as such, created equal in fundamental rights to Gondring and Mrs. Don-o.
The law at present treats them as property, but that only shows how abysmally corrupt our law has become.
We are not facing a huge array of permissible alternatives. There are only two: if the embryos are viable, they must be preserved until they can be implanted. If they are not viable (dead) they require the respectful disposition appropriate for any other human remains.
Two more points on the lack of successful therapeutic applications derived from ESCR: first, you have (as you mentioned) repeatedly asserted that such applications have been demonstrated in vivo, but have never been kind enough to document this assertion. Second, the vanishingly remote hopes referred to by the two people quoted in the WSJ are especialy persuasive because they are themselves dependent on research funds -- that's their income stream --- and so for THEM to say ~but really, folks, these hopes are [ahem] a long, long time from now and far, far away ~ means, to the rest of us, hey, this is not the most promising venue for medical progress.
Sincerely interested in your documentation.
These rats did not get tumors...
By early summer, a handful of patients with severe spinal cord injuries will be eligible for injections of specialized nerve cells designed to enable electrical signals to travel between the brain and the rest of the body. When the cells were administered to rats that had lost control of their hind legs, they regained the ability to walk and run, albeit with a limp.
[...]
The cell therapy is made from one of the first batches of human embryonic stem cells ever created. Researchers had feared those cells could never be used to treat people because they were derived using molecules from mice and cows and thus might be rejected by the human immune system. Newer stem cell lines that are animal-free have not been eligible for federal research funding under the policy set by President Bush in 2001. As a result, many people had expected FDA approval for any embryonic stem cell therapy to be years away.
Now, however, the FDA appears satisfied that the stem cells are safe for human use, and more clinical trials are sure to follow, said Amy Comstock Rick, president of the Coalition for the Advancement of Medical Research, a patient advocacy group that supports stem cell research. "It shows that things are starting to move through the pipeline," she said.