U.S. Senator Arlen Specter and Majority Leader Bill Frist are headed for a showdown. The confrontation that’s looming is over something close to Specter’s heart, his stem-cell bill.

Co-sponsored with Iowa Senator Tom Harkin, the bill would override Bush’s ban on federal funding of stem-cell research that uses frozen embryos, a prohibition that has stymied research into cures for the incurable.

The bill looked as if it would sail through the Senate as easily as it passed the House. That was before conservatives threw up a roadblock in the form of competing bills proposing methods of creating new stem-cell lines that don’t involve the destruction of embryos.

There’s no evidence those methods will yield stem cells anytime soon. What they will yield is a safe harbor for some senators who would have voted for the Specter bill.

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