Politics & Power Quote by Robert Lanza

Impatience is doing the heavy lifting here, not policy detail. Lanza isn’t merely disagreeing with President Bush; he’s reframing delay as its own kind of damage. “We don’t have time” turns a political argument into a biomedical emergency, borrowing the moral urgency of triage: every postponed decision quietly chooses who doesn’t get helped.

The second sentence is the sharper instrument. “How many breakthroughs have been missed” is a question that can’t be answered, and that’s the point. It forces the listener to imagine an invisible graveyard of cures: treatments never discovered, careers never launched, experiments never funded. By making the cost unknowable, Lanza widens it. The subtext is that the policy’s defenders can’t claim prudence if they can’t even quantify what their caution has foreclosed.

Context matters: this lands in the early-2000s fight over federal funding for embryonic stem cell research, when Bush-era restrictions pushed many labs into legal and financial contortions or overseas collaborations. As a scientist, Lanza is also fighting for the legitimacy of expertise in a debate crowded with moral absolutism. He doesn’t argue the ethics head-on; he shifts the frame to outcomes, innovation, and lost time.

There’s a strategic insinuation too: “change his mind” paints the policy as personal, even stubborn, rather than the product of democratic deliberation. That’s an invitation to bypass the White House entirely - rally Congress, states, private funders - and treat scientific momentum as something politics shouldn’t be allowed to throttle.