I recently participated in a debate at the Harvard Medical School on the ethics of stem cell cloning. A co-panelist was Dr. Michael West, a Massachusetts biotech executive. His announcement a week earlier of a supposed breakthrough in human cloning nearly stampeded the Senate into banning cloning even for therapeutic purposes. There are indeed many ethical issues here, but the religious right has so thoroughly hijacked the conversation that the knotty scientific and ethical questions get sidetracked. On the issue of stem cell research, the gap between the scientific and religious cultures has never been wider. West tried to reassure several right-to-lifers in the Harvard audience by respectfully engaging them on their own terms. He explained that the early embryonic cells that his laboratory tries to turn into specialized tissue for therapeutic purposes hadn't even ''individuated'' yet. He even tried recourse to scripture. But you can't debate facts, much less scripture, with someone...

V ice President Gore has unveiled a supplemental retirement plan. The government would match private savings put aside by working families, with a match as generous as three to one for families with incomes under $30,000. Families with incomes as high as $100,000 could qualify for a partial match. The plan works through refundable tax credits, so if your tax liability were lower than the earned tax credit, the government would just provide cash. The supplemental savings account, like Social Security, would be blocked until retirement. The plan would cost about $20 billion a year. The plan nicely sums up Al Gore's strengths and weaknesses as candidate, leader, and policy wonk. On the plus side, Gore's proposal is a supplement to America's basic retirement plan, and not a Bush-style raid on it. It uses government subsidy to build the assets of low- and middle-income working families. Bush, by contrast, would offer broad-brush tax cuts, most of whose benefits would flow to the upper...