Bring me to life

The old saying, 'There's nowt so queer as folk' should have a variant, 'there's nowt so fecking stupid as folk'. Seriously now.
Today's top science news story, reported in the Observer, tells of a British research team who have succeeded in taking cells from DEAD embryos and turning them into living cells. There should be no downside to this. This is like God giving the thumbs up to stem cell research.
But of course not, how could this not rattle the bloody cages of the 'right to life' zomboids? You can see their little muzzles twitching, their eyes popping from their sockets, as they search to turn this around. After all, why offer hope to the families of Alzheimers sufferers when you can turn up the heat on your own already sour gastric juices just because you hear a scientist say something like this...

"All 13 had stopped developing a few days after conception. 'They were in a very early stage of development,' said Stojkovic, now head of Sintocell, the Serbian medical research centre.The team then waited 24 hours to check that the embryos were no longer dividing before beginning their experiments. 'These were all deemed to be arrested embryos,' said Stojkovic. 'In other words, they were dead."

No, Uriah Heep-like, the 'right-to-hate-science -ers' wring their bony hands and proclaim,

"There is the critical question of how you know when an embryo is dead or not"

See, I think that if a whole team of very experienced scientists reckon it's dead and the cells no longer fit the definition of life (which as coincidence would have it I happen to have looked up yesterday) then 'this parrot has ceased to be'. Another scientist made this point,

"Regardless of how you feel about personhood for embryos, if the embryo is dead, then the issue of personhood is resolved,"

There was one reasonable scientific concern quoted,

"'If there was something wrong with the embryo that made it arrest, isn't there something wrong with these cells? We don't know.'"

Ok, fair enough gov'nor, and clearly that will bear a great deal of further research so long as y'all are left to get on with this work.

One person we all hope won't be brought back to life, and that indeed the rumours turn out to be true and that he won't just pop up and say 'rumours of my death were wildly exaggerated' is the evil Osama Bin Laden. Have the clever Americans been lobbing bags of e-coli infected spinach at him? Obviously not, only the righteous eat spinach, everyone knows that.
No, the story is that he had popped across the border for a weekend break at the Costa del Pakistan, when a rogue typhoid brewed up in the ocean and hit him. Obviously I have interpreted here. No-one wants to suspect Pakistan, a country that plays cricket, the game of gentlefolk, of harbouring the planet's most wanted terrorist.

I'm in the mood for gore today, I have been reading Angela Carter's 'The Bloody Chamber', now THAT's good short-story writing. Nicely done.