All of us who have a little spare tire that we would like to dispose of, and all of us who would like to reverse the tide of dying brain cells, not to mention replace injured knee cells, must rejoice in the news that Stanford scientists have found a way to convert yesterday's over-indulgence at dinner into tomorrow's cause for a Nobel Prize or Olympic Gold Medal. Eventually, as Dr. Joseph Wu suggests, you may be able to trade in your fat for whatever you need elsewhere, including brain cells.
America is to fat what Saudia Arabia is to oil. It is one of our most abundant resources and the one natural deposit that just keeps increasing. Give our unprecedentedly fat bodies over to the Stanford folk and we soon can become history's smartest and most fit people as well. Who knows what genius and agility are locked in our meandering midriffs and marbled thighs?
Meanwhile, the real news is that science is killing the argument for the necessity of embryonic stem cell research. That pathway is not only immoral, but also a dead end.
Stanford University is in California, of course, the state that is so broke it can't pay its employees. Yet the Golden State governing class set aside several billion dollars for embryonic stem cell research. If the fat in their heads had been converted into brain cells, maybe they wouldn't have made such a blunder.
