Christopher Reeve, Superman from the movies, is dead.

* Christopher Reeve, Superman from the movies, is dead. After a riding accident in 1995, he put up a valiant fight to overcome his paralysis and to find a cure for spinal-cord injuries. After he died, John Edwards said, "If we do the work that we can do in this country, the work that we will do when John Kerry is president, people like Christopher Reeve are going to walk, get up out of that wheelchair and walk again." Edwards's reference was to federally funded embryonic-stem-cell research, a cause dear to Reeve. The candidate's gross promise cannot be said to have misused Reeve, who was prone to the same type of overstatement in promoting the research. "The cure is just around the corner," he said. We have no reason to think that it is, although we can always hope. And while we do not agree with the means Reeve wanted to employ in the search for a cure--the destruction of early-stage human beings--we can laud the good he did in his too-brief life. Senator, we knew Ronald Reagan ...