Here is one excerpt which I found a concise summary:
"President Obama is now personally responsible for research that will involve the intentional destruction of human embryos. This comes even as the ideological roots of this conflict have become increasingly clear. Credible alternatives to research that would require the destruction of human embryos have become available, even as the most promising avenues of medical research are now using adult stem cells, which avoids the moral issues involved in the use of human embryos.
The scientific community increasingly appears to have drawn a line in the sand on this issue. The insistence that embryos must be destroyed is a matter of ideology. Some researchers seem to resist any alternative source of stem cells, no matter how great its potential."
And this illustrates well the fallacy within the idea of "keeping ___ and personal beliefs (or religion, or conviction, or faith-- call it what you will) separate." In one sense, you can't! Legislation is almost always moral-- we always legislate morality.
"The "instead of dogma" language is a direct criticism of the Bush administration policies. President Obama delivered a rebuke to the Bush administration in this new statement of policy, but the new President is either disingenuous or deceptive when he suggests that science can ever be free from political considerations. Science does not happen in a vacuum. Scientific research takes place in a social and political context, and when the federal government is involved through funding of that research, such research is intensely political. The space race was fueled by the ideological context of the Cold War. Decisions about research priorities and policies is hotly political. So is President Obama's new policy that will lead to the destruction of more human embryos."
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