Darn Cells. Dividing Yet Again!

Actually, they are pretty good, experts said. After all, stem cell research is hot, and a lot of it is focused on finding ways to obtain the therapeutically promising cells without the scientific and ethical complications of dealing with human embryos.

"Papers are coming out about embryonic stem cells so regularly that the odds are going to be high that some will come out when Congress is voting on them," said David Ropeik, an expert in risk assessment at Harvard Extension School.

"It seems like a case of confirmation bias," agreed John Allen Paulos, an expert in probabilities at Temple University. "That's the tendency, once you've made a tentative judgment, to look for factors that seem to confirm your judgment and to ignore facts that say otherwise" -- such as all those other papers that were published when Congress was voting on other stuff.

Then there is the question of motive. The Brits are competing against Americans in the stem cell field and are legally allowed to conduct studies on embryos. Might they be aiming to dominate the field by helping the conservative and religious forces that have so far restricted U.S. scientists' access to embryos?

Or might the journals be trying, as one stem cell expert opined on the condition of anonymity, to leverage their visibility by publishing stem cell articles just as Congress is voting on the topic?

"Nature has no hidden agenda in publishing these papers," said the journal's senior press officer, Ruth Francis, in an e-mail. The real goal was to get the papers out before a big stem cell conference in Australia next week, she said.

Perhaps not surprisingly, it isn't only proponents of stem cell research who over-connect the dots.

"I will confess, I said to one of the congressional staffers of my general persuasion: 'Doesn't God have a sense of humor?' " said Richard Doerflinger of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, which opposes embryo research and fought against the bill.

"There is somebody looking out for us! God is telling us He is there!" Doerflinger said, adding that he was half joking and recognizes that it is a "little presumptuous" to think that God is personally involved in the stem cell debate.

To Ropeik, the Harvard risk expert, the fact that people are imputing anything more than sheer coincidence is "just more proof that inside the Beltway the thinking is so myopic. They see the whole world through their own lens, and are blinded" to common sense.

But the urge is difficult to resist.

Consider the names of the lead scientists on one of the research papers released Thursday -- a paper suggesting that stem cell scientists might no longer need to rely on human eggs for their studies -- Kevin Eggan and Dieter Egli.

Eggs. Eggan. Egli.

C'mon. What are the odds?