Or so it says in the Haaretz.com piece that Andrew Rosenthal sent us. The claim is attributed to Gerald Fischbach, Dean of Columbia’s College of Physicians and Surgeons:
“The U.S. is now looking to many laboratories in Israel, to modern innovations both in the science and in the politics dealing with stem cell research,” Dr. Gerald Fischbach, who is also executive vice president for health and biomedical sciences at Columbia, said at the conference Tuesday. “I think the ethical debate is on a very high level, that it’s not colored by religious dogma the way it is in the United States,” he told AngloFile.
It isn’t obvious to me that anybody in the U.S. is paying much attention to the incredibly thoughtful scholarship about respect for the embryo that is coming out of Israel these days, but maybe so.