Educate or leave it be?

I am an educator. I also have a standard academic/intellectual approach to things. I am happy to debate, I like to find out what the truth is, I take a bit of odd egotistical pride in admitting I am wrong when I am.

Now, what if someone else is wrong, or says I am wrong when I'm not? My native tendency is to correct them, and supply direct evidence showing what I am saying is true (or as true as we poor human creatures normally get to).

Now add on another hitch suppose the misinformation that the other person has is common misinformation? I run into this problem frequently, as there is a lot of common misinformation out there.

And finally what if the misinformation is propaganda? This is where I get the most conflicted. 1) Wow is that WRONG and it is used to support what I think of as bad ideology on top of that! 2) If I give this person the information that will show the errors they will think it is an attack on their ideology, which in truth it will be and they may take it very personally. 3) They may be so successfully propaganda brainwashed that they will assume that I am the one who is, and disregard all evidence to the contrary.

But still, there I go, bringing out information, showing data, all with a sinking heart.

Tonight I was doing it about stem cells. I was so pleased to see the removal of Bush's strict limits on human embryonic stem cell research. There has been so much promising work done with mouse ES cells that it is a real shame that similar work has lagged so with human ES cells. Obama's removal of Presidential limits will not open the field wide of course, congress and States need to deal with it now. But, I was pleased and Obama's statements about separating science from ideology were nice to hear.

Of course I found myself accused of being blatantly political in my approach to science. I was told that "All of the promising research is in adult or umbilical cord stem cells. This is nakedly political." In truth the person doesn't think that the federal government should support ANY scientific research, or education for that matter. The free market should handle everything. Personally I would not want to live in that entirely free market world. I think the government provides societal roles that the free market really can't, but that is besides the point.

There is some very exciting embryonic stem cell work being done. Most of it is done with Mouse ES cells, and a good chunk of it not in the U.S. So, I supplied lists of articles and titles and authors for a handful of cool new ES studies published in the last few months. Most of them were done with mouse cells, most of them were not dne in this country. A couple of them checked non-embryonic stem cells to see how they might work. Answer? Not so well.

I completely expect to be lambasted for this, or to be met with hurt. Oh well. It seems that I can't not do it. I want to set the facts straight.