June 7, 2004 - This week will be devoted to memorializing Ronald Wilson Reagan, the 40th President of the United States. On television the men and women who knew him and worked closely with him will share their memories of his life and career. Our newspapers will be filled with column inch after column inch describing his contribution to America’s political fabric accentuating his vision of a young nation eternally greeting the promise of a new dawn. Ironically he died at the beginning of the week when Bill Clinton’s 900 page memoir hit the book sellers’ shelves. There will be no memoir from Ronnie Reagan’s pen and that is a tragedy. His death also came on the eve of the 60th anniversary of D-Day, an occasion filled with the shared memories of the men who created that watershed of history with their own lives.

“The golden years are when you sit back, hopefully, and exchange memories, and that's the worst part about this disease, there's nobody to exchange memories with, and we had a lot of memories," his wife told Mike Wallace in a 60 Minutes interview shortly after their 50th wedding anniversary. . "I'd love to talk to him about it, and there were times when I had to catch myself because I'd reach out and start to say, 'Honey, remember, when?' " She was robbed of that simple pleasure and history was robbed of the unique insights that only the memories of the central character in the play of the human story can provide. The thief that took Nancy Reagan’s golden years was one of the constellation of diseases in which the body attacks itself – Alzheimer’s disease that took President Reagan’s memories and his ability to reason from him and from the world.

There is scarcely an American family that has not been afflicted by one of those insidious and incurable conditions. Alzheimer’s is just one. Diabetes is another and one in which most recently has been found to be a precursor to Alzheimer’s. Fully 40% of Americans will suffer from diabetes in their lifetimes. Parkinson’s disease is another. That constellation of auto-immune conditions includes Lupus and Scleroderma that slowly and inevitably destroy the body’s ability to function. All of these conditions share something else – the promise that stem-cell therapies can reduce or even reverse their effects. But that scientific dawn with its promise to relieve the suffering of millions of American families has been deferred in America for political and not scientific considerations.

The President who claims Ronald Reagan’s political legacy has drawn the shades to darken the windows lest America see the dawn of stem cell therapies. It is better in his view that millions suffer in ideological purity than that America should greet this scientific dawn with enthusiasm. Ronald Reagan, who once saw America eternally basking in the light of new mornings left this life from a long sunset – a sunset that George W. Bush seeks to prolong.