Great Article by Charles Krauthammer…Here is an Excerpt…
The embryonic stem cell debate is over.
Which allows a bit of reflection on the storm that has raged ever since the August 2001 announcement of President Bush’s stem cell policy.
The verdict is clear: Rarely has a president — so vilified for a moral stance — been so thoroughly vindicated.
Why? Precisely because he took a moral stance. Precisely because, as Thomson puts it, Bush was made “a little bit uncomfortable” by the implications of embryonic experimentation. Precisely because he therefore decided that some moral line had to be drawn.
In doing so, he invited unrelenting demagoguery by an unholy trinity of Democratic politicians, research scientists and patient advocates who insisted that anyone who would put any restriction on the destruction of human embryos could be acting only for reasons of cynical politics rooted in dogmatic religiosity — a “moral ayatollah,” as Sen. Tom Harkin so scornfully put it.
Bush got it right. Not because he necessarily drew the line in the right place. I have long argued that a better line might have been drawn — between using doomed and discarded fertility-clinic embryos created originally for reproduction (permitted) and using embryos created solely to be disassembled for their parts, as in research cloning (prohibited). But what Bush got right was to insist, in the face of enormous popular and scientific opposition, on drawing a line at all, on requiring that scientific imperative be balanced by moral considerations.
November 30th, 2007 at 1:48 pm
Here’s the real kicker, Bush not only won over moral conservatives, but fiscal conservatives for his refusal to subsidize ESC research. I don’t want my tax moneys being used for an unproven technique with no guarantee of success. Some religious groups may have been upset that the research wasn’t outright banned, but Bush did an excellent job satisfying a multitude of parties and waiting for science to solve it’s way out of this ethically questionable research.
Whoever ends up getting the nomination, any Democrat attacking him based on this issue will only have the issue backfire on them now. Just ask him/her how many embryonic stem cell treatments are out there vs Adult Stem Cells. The whole issue is moot.
November 30th, 2007 at 2:20 pm
Not to start an argument but if they didn’t use embryonic stem cells to begin with they wouldn’t know what they were looking for. I’m in the “just a bunch of cell” group, like most Americans are.
November 30th, 2007 at 2:52 pm
Exactly wrong.
What Krauthammer lauds is that Bush has set a precedent for political interference in scientific research.
He has crippled a small, but important area of scientific research in the US – with a fair number of leading researchers moving overseas in order to continue their work. And, because of the precedent, cast a pall over all fields of scientific research that could, in some concievable way, become seen as unacceptable to future poltical movements.
And, of course, the embryonic stem cell debate is not over. They wont be over till Jan. 09 when we have a new president. ESC research continues apace. The recent innovations are wonderful, and promising, but do not represent some magical creation of true ESC cells. There are enormous numbers of changes that happen to the genetic expression regime as a cell becomes specialized. The researchers have managed to get skin cells to lose some unknown amount of their specialization, and to divide (uncontrollably). Maybe this is road that might turn out to be very frutiful, maybe not.
Keep poltics (and religion!) out of science!
November 30th, 2007 at 3:47 pm
Tano, believing in the idea that fatal research on human beings without the consent of the human is hardly a virtue limited to just teh religious community. Of course you will disagree with me and say that the patient is just an embryo and not a human, but that is a completely different debate. My point is that the idea of consent is nothing too extreme.
November 30th, 2007 at 4:01 pm
BarkTwiggs
I’m what many would call a “fiscal conservative”, and I think the ECS research restrictions were a terrible idea. One of the areas in which massive government spending is justified is in the creation of new technologies that are longshots in terms of ever coming to fruition, but would be transformative if they ever did. Market mechanisms generally do not work well with these kinds of things, since the risk to reward ratio is too high, and/or the time gap between the start of the project and its eventual use in applications is too long. Governement investment may take the place of investment of capital via market mechanisms in such cases, and has worked brilliantly in doing so in the past. Pretty much all of the technology you are using to read this blog right now was developed in conjunction with the U.S. military, NASA, or some other national program, or was funded by grants from the Department of Energy, Department of Defense, or National Science Foundation, among others.
November 30th, 2007 at 4:07 pm
Tano, are you a scientist? You seem very well informed. I’m a biochemist myself.
November 30th, 2007 at 4:22 pm
BigS,
yeah, I work for the NIH (through a contractor). My training is in comparative anatomy and evolutionary biology, but I now work reviewing the current scientific literature in biomedicine for the PubMed databse.