President Obama took the opportunity to hold another media moment yesterday, this time on his reversal of the limits on federal funding for certain types of embryonic stem cell research. Even beyond the specter of the president fiddling while the economy burns, Obama chose to generate more heat than light on the subject of stem cell research with his preening as the champion of science over ideology, and ultimately decided not to even take a position on the key issue at stake....whether or not to support the creation of embryos specifically to be used (and destroyed) for their stem cells.
Democrats made hay in the election campaign by willfully distorting the positions of the Bush administration specifically, and conservatives generally, on the issue of stem cell research. That is, to portray Bush and the Right as being "opposed to stem cell research" in general, which was a lie even had the distinction been made between adult stem cell research and the more controversial embryonic variety. The implication of course was that these people cared less about finding cures for dread human diseases than Democrats did, and the less the people knew about the complexities of the issue, the better it suited the Democrats.
As some, but not nearly enough Americans are now aware, the Bush policy had been to enthusiastically encourage adult stem cell research and to fund it with taxpayer money, and also to encourage and fund embryonic stem cell research on existing stem cell lines. What Bush would not do was permit taxpayer dollars to be spent on the creation of human embryos, so they could then be destroyed for their stem cells, a position he took after convening a distinguished Presidential Council on Bioethics to deliberate and advise him, and after listening to the concerns of millions of his fellow-Americans who were and are repulsed by the idea.
And for all the hoopla and posturing yesterday about rescuing pure science from the ideological clutches of the neocons, Obama contributed plenty of rhetoric and precious little leadership, punting that responsibility to the Congress and the National Institutes of Health. He chose instead to (first, as always, gratuitously bash his predecessor) and then to relax funding restrictions on research using the hundreds of thousands of existing embryos currently being stored in fertility clinics around the country as sources of embryonic stem cells. As to where President Science stands on the important moral dilemma facing American society in terms of how we should limit (or not limit) researchers on the matter of creating individualized (read: customized) human embryos for the purpose of supplying stem cells...or tissues or organs...he does not say. The buck stops where?
Again, to clarify...because it's important...Bush did not "ban" stem cell research. He did not even ban embryonic stem cell research. Even the most controversial sort of ESCR continued during the Bush administration, albeit unfunded by the American taxpayer, even as partisan Democrats demagogued the issue as if Bush were standing in the way of an imminent cure for your Uncle Charlie's Alzheimer's. Who politicized the issue again?
The WaPo account (via contentions) includes this:
The task of deciding what kinds of studies will be supported now falls to the National Institutes of Health, which finds itself confronting far more extensive questions than its officials were contemplating. It has 120 days to do the job.Among other things, officials will have to decide whether to endorse studies on cells obtained from much more contentious sources, such as embryos created specifically for research or by means of cloning techniques.
“He left it wide open,†said Thomas H. Murray, director of the Hastings Center, a bioethics think tank. “Now we are going to have to face a host of morally complicated, politically charged questions. There’s not an easy path forward for them out of here.â€
But beyond all the subtleties of the SCR issue that never get mentioned because they get in the way of Republican-bashing, for Obama to suggest that politics should be somehow extricated from this scientific issue is exactly wrong. We are dealing with the shaping of public policy, a decidedly political undertaking. Robert P. George and Eric Cohen say it much more eloquently than I could in their WSJ op-ed:
Mr. Obama made a big point in his speech of claiming to bring integrity back to science policy, and his desire to remove the previous administration's ideological agenda from scientific decision-making. This claim of taking science out of politics is false and misguided on two counts.First, the Obama policy is itself blatantly political. It is red meat to his Bush-hating base, yet pays no more than lip service to recent scientific breakthroughs that make possible the production of cells that are biologically equivalent to embryonic stem cells without the need to create or kill human embryos. Inexplicably -- apart from political motivations -- Mr. Obama revoked not only the Bush restrictions on embryo destructive research funding, but also the 2007 executive order that encourages the National Institutes of Health to explore non-embryo-destructive sources of stem cells.
Second and more fundamentally, the claim about taking politics out of science is in the deepest sense antidemocratic. The question of whether to destroy human embryos for research purposes is not fundamentally a scientific question; it is a moral and civic question about the proper uses, ambitions and limits of science. It is a question about how we will treat members of the human family at the very dawn of life; about our willingness to seek alternative paths to medical progress that respect human dignity.
For those who believe in the highest ideals of deliberative democracy, and those who believe we mistreat the most vulnerable human lives at our own moral peril, Mr. Obama's claim of "taking politics out of science" should be lamented, not celebrated.
(emphasis mine - DW)
A Time article celebrates the "almost audible" sigh of relief from labs around the country, and laments the "long eight years for stem cell researchers as the ugly stepchildren of science." And one additional paragraph in the Time piece is especially telling as it relates to the ultimate goals of certain embryonic stem cell proponents...
As welcome as the reversal is, some researchers grumble that it is too little, too late. Since, and in spite of, the ban, scientists have achieved remarkable advances in stem-cell science, which may one day obviate the need for embryos altogether. New techniques in generating stem cells from skin cells may prove in coming years more efficient and reliable than using embryonic stem cells.
And this is a problem...how? Advances obviating the need for embryos....more efficient and reliable stem cells? Why again are they grumbling?
It is pretty remarkable that the scientific advances made since 2005 noted above are little discussed in the national debate (such as it is) over ESCR. In September of 2005, research conducted at Harvard University proved that embryonic stem cells can be produced without creating or destroying a human embryo at all. These promising findings coincided with results of research at other leading universities showing that other stem cells from umbilical or placental blood can also be induced to show the same pluripotency (the potential of a cell to develop into multiple types of mature cells) that embryonic stem cells possess, and in which is posited their great potential for life-saving cures.
ESCR opponents rejoiced at the news of these discoveries, delighted that the moral objection to this practice might now be rendered moot, since the embryonic stem cells favored by researchers for their versatility would soon be available without having to create and subsequently kill human embryos. And you'd think that stem cell researchers would be delighted as well....all the pluripotency they relish, without any of the moral baggage....not to mention an end to the hectoring from the Right. But you'd be wrong.
If all they wanted was an unlimited supply of pluripotent embryonic stem cells for research, why would the scientists noted in the Time article be grumbling? And why would President Obama rescind the 2007 Bush order encouraging the NIH to develop these new non-embryo-destroying sources of stem cells? (see bolded section of George/Cohen op-ed)
There are problems with actual clinical treatments for actual human ailments using embryonic stem cells, as most of the articles will eventually get around to admitting in the 17th paragraph or so. For all the vast potential suggested by ESCR researchers (which I don't doubt for a minute, just to be clear) it is still just potential, while adult stem cells are already in either clinical trials or actual treatments for some 73 human diseases or conditions.
And the argument has not eluded me that ESCR researchers might be farther along than they are had they been the recipients of massive funding from Uncle Sam over the last eight years. They might be. But it's not like American researchers have been the only ones working on developing the potential of embryonic stem cells either.
As to the reasons for resisting alternative sources of embryonic stem cells by ESCR researchers and their patrons in the bio-technology industry, the Time article gets right down to it. Citing one immediate result of Obama's kicking the can down the road on the question of creating embryos specifically for their destruction, the article says...
Without being able to create embryos and their stem cells specially for individual patients, researchers say there is a risk of incompatibility between patients and any stem cells created from unrelated embryos. Even though embryonic stem cells can be guided to become any type of cell in the body, if they are transplanted into patients — as insulin-producing cells for people with diabetes, for instance — they must be tissue-matched to the patient to eliminate the risk of rejection. So for now, any practical benefit of having more embryonic stem cells exists only in the lab, not in the clinic.
Unless and until, that is, we as a society allow, for example, parents (or at least well-to-do parents) to create an embryo (their own, perfectly tissue-matched embryo) in order to extract well-suited stem cells to treat, for example, an ailment suffered by their 3-year old child. What would then deter us as a society from allowing a set of parents to let an embryo gestate long enough to grow certain helpful tissues...or perhaps a kidney...before it has outlived its usefulness to them?
Moreover, should we let scientists and/or bureaucrats at the National Institutes of Health make those decisions for us as a society?
Robert P. George, (the same distinguished Professor of Jurisprudence at Princeton, and member of Bush's Council on Bioethics referenced above) wrote a piece for the Weekly Standard in 2005 that is, as they say, not available without subscription. I will rely on the continued good graces of that fine publication to excuse my trashing of any "fair use" guideline as I excerpt liberally from it below.
George noted the discoveries that year of alternative methods of producing pluripotent stem cells, and suggested a couple of ominous possible developments. First, the problem of the growing lobbying power of the biotechnology industry, and second, the possibility that over time, the American people might gradually lose their sense of revulsion at the idea of "fetal farming". One can already sense that revulsion starting to slip away...in just over three years.
Up to now, embryonic stem cell advocates have claimed that they are only interested in stem cells harvested from embryos at the blastocyst (or five-to six-day) stage. They have denied any intention of implanting embryos either in the uterus of a volunteer or in an artificial womb in order to harvest cells, tissues, or organs at more advanced stages of embryonic development or in the fetal stage. Advocates are well aware that most Americans, including those who are prepared to countenance the destruction of very early embryos, are not ready to approve the macabre practice of "fetus farming." However, based on the literature I have read and the evasive answers given by spokesmen for the biotechnology industry at meetings of the President's Council on Bioethics, I fear that the long-term goal is indeed to create an industry in harvesting late embryonic and fetal body parts for use in regenerative medicine and organ transplantation.This would explain why some advocates of embryonic stem cell research are not cheering the news about alternative sources of pluripotent stem cells. If their real goal is fetus farming, then the cells produced by alternative methods will not serve their purposes.
Why would biomedical scientists be interested in fetus farming? Researchers know that stem cells derived from blastocyst-stage embryos are currently of no therapeutic value and may never actually be used in the treatment of diseases. (In a candid admission, South Korean cloning expert Curie Ahn recently said that developing therapies may take "three to five decades.")
In fact, there is not a single embryonic stem cell therapy even in clinical trials. (By contrast, adult and umbilical cord stem cells are already being used in the treatment of 65 diseases.) All informed commentators know that embryonic stem cells cannot be used in therapies because of their tendency to generate dangerous tumors. However, recent studies show that the problem of tumor formation does not exist in cells taken from cows, mice, and other mammals when embryos have been implanted and extracted after several weeks or months of development (i.e. have been gestated to the late embryonic or fetal stage). This means that the real therapeutic potential lies precisely in the practice of fetus farming. Because the developmental process stabilizes cells (which is why we are not all masses of tumors), it is likely true that stem cells, tissues, and organs harvested from human beings at, say, 16 or 18 weeks or later could be used in the treatment of diseases.
Scientists associated with a leading firm in the embryonic stem cell field, Advanced Cell Technology, recently published a research paper discussing the use of stem cells derived from cattle fetuses that had been produced by cloning (to create a genetic match). Although the article did not mention human beings, it was plain that the purpose of the research was not to cure diseased cows, but rather to establish the potential therapeutic value of doing precisely the same thing with human beings. For those who have ears to hear, the message is clear. I am hardly the first to perceive this message. Slate magazine bioethics writer Will Saletan drew precisely the same conclusion in a remarkable five-part series, the final installment of which was entitled "The Organ Factory: The Case for Harvesting Older Human Embryos."
If we do not put into place a legislative ban on fetus farming, public opposition to the practice could erode. People now find it revolting. But what will happen to public sentiment if the research is permitted to go forward and in fact generates treatments for some dreadful diseases or afflictions? I suspect that those in the biotech industry who do look forward to fetus farming are betting that moral opposition will collapse when the realistic prospect of cures is placed before the public.
Here is that remarkable five-part series by Will Saletan: The Organ Factory
And here is Will Saletan today: "Winning Smugly"
Jonah Goldberg on SCR breakthroughs
UPDATE 3/13:
...given the protean power of embryonic manipulation, the temptation it presents to science and the well-recorded human propensity for evil even in the pursuit of good, lines must be drawn. I suggested the bright line prohibiting the deliberate creation of human embryos solely for the instrumental purpose of research -- a clear violation of the categorical imperative not to make a human life (even if only a potential human life) a means rather than an end.Posted by dan at March 10, 2009 9:13 PMOn this, Obama has nothing to say. He leaves it entirely to the scientists. This is more than moral abdication. It is acquiescence to the mystique of "science" and its inherent moral benevolence. How anyone as sophisticated as Obama can believe this within living memory of Mengele and Tuskegee and the fake (and coercive) South Korean stem cell research is hard to fathom.
That part of the ceremony, watched from the safe distance of my office, made me uneasy. The other part -- the ostentatious issuance of a memorandum on "restoring scientific integrity to government decision-making" -- would have made me walk out.
Restoring? The implication, of course, is that while Obama is guided solely by science, Bush was driven by dogma, ideology and politics.
What an outrage. Bush's nationally televised stem cell speech was the most morally serious address on medical ethics ever given by an American president. It was so scrupulous in presenting the best case for both his view and the contrary view that until the last few minutes, the listener had no idea where Bush would come out.
Obama's address was morally unserious in the extreme. It was populated, as his didactic discourses always are, with a forest of straw men. Such as his admonition that we must resist the "false choice between sound science and moral values." Yet, exactly 2 minutes and 12 seconds later he went on to declare that he would never open the door to the "use of cloning for human reproduction."
Does he not think that a cloned human would be of extraordinary scientific interest? And yet he banned it.
Is he so obtuse as not to see that he had just made a choice of ethics over science? Yet, unlike Bush, who painstakingly explained the balance of ethical and scientific goods he was trying to achieve, Obama did not even pretend to make the case why some practices are morally permissible and others not.
This is not just intellectual laziness. It is the moral arrogance of a man who continuously dismisses his critics as ideological while he is guided exclusively by pragmatism (in economics, social policy, foreign policy) and science in medical ethics.