During his inauguration speech, Barack Obama promised to "restore science to its rightful place". Today, he has indeed proved that he's about to back those words up. From The Guardian:

The world's first trial of embryonic stem cell technology on humans is billed to take place this year after the US government gave it the go-ahead today.

First announcing that Guantà¡namo Bay will close, then that all the CIA ghost prisons around the globe will cease to exist and now this. A promising start, surely!

Let's hope for more promising news. The following's a stroppy post that I did on Seesmic regarding this, and I'm hoping for a bunch of American comments on the matter, even though the entire planet will hopefully be affected and that stem-cell research will continue in a much larger scale.