The landscape of stem cell research is littered with misconceptions, lawsuits, stifled legislation, and the ruined reputations of fallen scientists. It is also a scene of rancorous political debate, religious fiat, and patients’ pleas. Onto this battlefield marches Eve Herold, in her fittingly titled book, Stem Cell Wars. Herold, who is Director of Public Policy Research and Education at the Genetics Policy Institute, draws upon her unique and extensive experience with the primary issues in the ongoing stem cell debate to create a stirring firsthand account. Her book is an emphatic corrective to what she perceives as the politically motivated, religion-based voice of a minority that has intentionally confused and snookered the public into believing that stem cell research is ethically wrong and fundamentally evil. Herold takes great pains throughout the book to debunk the myths propagated by a fanatical few while advocating cogently on behalf of the scientists and patients who are struggling to push stem cell research forward. Beyond being a passionate response to the crusading rhetoric of a highly vocal minority, Stem Cell Wars is also a highly readable historical account of both the history of stem cell research and the current debates swirling around it. Herold has done a wonderful job of distilling a vast amount of literature and cultural history into a manageable form. By no means is this a book for the initiated; rather, it is pitched to an audience that is interested in, but not deeply conversant with, the current state of affairs in the field of stem cell research. While Stem Cell Wars is never impartial (and indeed is something of a call to arms), its overview, and point of view, should be useful and interesting to all but the most firmly anti-stem cell readers. Herold’s tactic de guerre is to introduce patient testimonials as her initial sorties into the most contentious issues of the stem cell debate. This humanizing touch rescues the book from the purely polemical and contributes to its sense of urgency and purpose. Herold lets us meet people on the frontlines of this struggle, rather than offering only a C-Span-styled transcript of dueling politicians. Her goal is to illustrate “how the promise of regenerative medicine is being threatened by a new, and highly undemocratic, political order.” It is this “tyranny of a powerful anti-science minority” that has made stem cell research “today’s flash point in the clash between forces of religious and political conservatism and a brave new medicine.” Herold’s rhetoric is hightoned, provocative, and aggressive—the direct style of a writer who recognizes and embraces the urgency of her message. Possibly Herold’s most important corrective is her clarification of the distinction between reproductive and therapeutic cloning, and the ways in which anticloning activists have willfully blurred the two for their own strategic purposes. Whereas reproductive cloning is “the creation of an exact genetic copy of an entire organism,” therapeutic cloning, also known as nuclear transfer, is the “technique for creating embryonic stem cells that are genetically matched to a patient.” The process of nuclear transfer is then described; Herold emphasizes that in therapeutic cloning, the resulting modified embryonic cells (or blastocyst) are only allowed to divide for a few days before pluripotent cells are harvested and cultured. Such blastocysts would not only never be transferred into a womb, but in any event are for technical reasons incapable of developing into the fetuses that alarmist anti-cloning activists claim will lead to the harvesting of body parts. Some scientists have re-dubbed such blastocysts “nuclear transfer constructs” to emphasize their distinction from actual viable embryos. These distinctions have been deliberately ignored by the religious right, Herold argues, since they would weaken the emotional impact engendered by public fear of reproductive cloning (advocated by virtually no one in the scientific or political communities), leaving the debate to be centered on the