"We're supposed to be people who love and protect life," Father Ian Trammell said April 12 as he reflected on the U.S. Senate's vote in favor of taxpayer funding for embryonic stem cell research.

"When you destroy an embryo, you are destroying life," said Father Trammell, diocesan Respect Life Coordinator.

To get that point across, especially in light of the Senate vote, Father Trammell is encouraging people to tune in to the 12 minute streaming video the Respect Life Office has just added to its website which provides great inside into why this issue is of the greatest importance.

"The first thing people need to do is to explore what the Church teaches on this issue and be aware of the political life in this country," he said. "It's time consuming and it takes effort but this video will help." It will, he said, help people to define the reasons why we all need to make a choice everyone can live with.

Like Father Trammell and Richard M. Doerflinger of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and a host of life-minded folks around the world, I can't quite get a handle on why a majority of U.S. Senators seem poised to make the opposite choice.

I can't figure out why, to use Doerfinger's words, they seem "fixated" on destructive research and "dazzled" by irresponsibly hyped promises of ‘miracle cures' from destroyed human embryos."

But as Doerflinger, deputy director of the USCCB's Secretariat for Pro-Life Activities, so eloquently put it just hours after the U.S. Senate voted 63-34 April 11, to approve S.5, a bill permitting destruction of human embryos in federally funded stem cell research, they obviously are.

The bill was one of two approved last week by the senate. In a separate vote of 70-28, the Senate passed another bill, S. 30 (the "Hope Offered through Principled and Ethical Stem Cell Research Act) which promotes taxpayer-funded research using stem cells from adult stem cells derived from sources such as bone marrow and placentas.

The second bill, which has the support of the White House, got scant attention in the American secular press which strikes me as so pathetic when news of the achievements of adult (non-embryonic) stem cell research zoom around cyberspace every day.

Take April 11, for instance. While the senators were voting in favor of using federal tax dollars for research that has yet to yield results and may never do so, news that 14 of 15 Type 1 diabetics became insulin-free for up to 35 months, went noticeably underreported in American secular newspapers where editors and reporters seem as bedazzled by the embryonic chimera as the senators.

The story was easy to track on the Internet. Versions of it turned up in online editions of newspapers and health tech sites from England to Australia to India to Tashkent under big headlines: "Stem cell transplant resets immune system in type 1 diabetes patients," trumpeted SpiritIndia.com, "Stem cell transplant promising for Type 1 diabetes" echoed Reuters Limited.

The object of that headline is the Voltarelli/Burt study, published in the April 11 issue of the prestigious Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA). The study involved injecting Type 1 diabetes patients with their own stem cells and has been lauded in some international scientific circles as "the start of a revolution in the treatment of Type 1 diabetes (with) results suggesting that insulin-dependent patients can be freed from reliance on needles by injection of their own stem cells."

To be sure, some observers have expressed concern about the study, raising questions about the risks connected with stem-cell transplantation and whether they outweigh the inconvenience of insulin injections. Others took issue with the fact that the Brazilian based team – led by Julio Voltarelli of the University of Sao Paulo and Richard Burt of Chicago's Northwestern University - used patients as young as 14 in the study.

But when all was said and done, the results stood for themselves. Data from the study showed that during a 7 to 36-month follow-up, 14 patients became insulin-free - one for 35 months, four for at least 21 months, seven for at least six months and two with late response were insulin-free for one and five months respectively.

On the day following the U.S. Senate vote, the authors were quoted in PharmaTimes World News as describing the results as "very encouraging" given that 93 percent of the patients achieved different periods of insulin independence while treatment-related toxicity was low and without mortality. Voltarelli and Burt stressed that further follow-up is needed to confirm the work.

After researching this study, a search of the Internet revealed that while Voltarelli and Burt's study may be leading the way right now, it's by no means the only game in town. Scientists at Harvard, Duke, the University of Florida, Stanford and Columbia are only a few of the researchers around the world working to create treatments for diabetes with non-embryonic stem cells.

And, since a number of promising results in other areas of adult cell research have already been transformed into actual cures, it's very hard to understand the inertia in the scientific and, often, sadly enough, lobbying communities regarding non-embryonic cells.

In supporting the "Stem Cell Research Enhancement Act" (S.5), the American Diabetes Association, a leading advocate of embryonic stem cell use, dismissed non-embryonic (adult) stem cell use because decades of research have so far failed to find a cure and called for Congress to work together to override the veto that President Bush has promised. The Association never once acknowledged the Voltarelli/Burt study or any of the other advances toward a cure for diabetes related to adult stem cell research.

It's hard to reconcile dismissal of a cure that seems so close at hand for Type 1 and Type 2 diabetes with adult stem cells when all experts seem to be in agreement that any cure from embryonic stem cells is decades away at best.

It's also hard to reconcile why, when there have been so many medical successes with adult stem cells, the embryonic hardliners persist in a course that will, as Doerflinger has said, force millions of taxpayers to promote "attacks on innocent human life in the name of scientific progress."

From the looks of things, that's a course that could divert funding from realistic research that could result in cures for all manner of diseases. And that, by any reasonable standard, is just plain wrong.