Stem Cell Angst

Don't be fooled. The current bill in Congress to expand stem cell research has nothing to do with catching up to the South Koreans or opening up a back door for reproductive cloning. All it would do is expand the availability of embryonic stem cells to already created embryos that have been set to be discarded by fertility clinics.

Some say this is about ethics and that we should err on the side of caution when it comes to using federal money for something that certain people find morally objectionable. Morality aside, the president's initial ban and veto is a real danger to the autonomy of science. It would be a more consistent position (and safer for government science in the long run) for ESC research to be considered outright illegal. The reality of the situation is that the NIH is by far the major funder of American medical research, as well as employing many of the top scientists in the country. Congress and the president should not be able to micromanage what can and cannot get funded. If, as some say, no American taxpayer should be required to fund from her own dollars what she regards as a moral outrage, what is to stop the public from pushing to pull all federal research in HIV? Or other STDs? Or genetic disorders that primarily affect Jews like Tay-Sachs disease? Or to stop funding on individual, peer-reviewed grants that they deem morally repugnant, like Congress attempted to do a few years ago on certain AIDS and transgendered studies? I am a huge supporter of federalism, but states and private companies cannot and shouldn't have to pick up the slack in this arena of national interest (even though they seem to be doing a good job of it). If the American people feel that it is important to fund medical research with federal tax dollars, they should accept what the scientists deem promising enough to fund and not second-guess the peer-review process.

Yet if its ethics you are concerned with, consider this: when Bush limited the stem cell lines government scientists were allowed to use, ESC research was about 3 years old. That's worse than saying it was in its infancy as a science. In those days, the only way they could get ESCs to proliferate was to grow them on a layer of mouse "feeder" cells, which we have recently discovered have contaminated the approved cell lines so that they are probably unusable. In fact, it is quite possible that to attempt to use these lines for any therapeutic treatment would be unethical, given their state. In other words, the ban itself is probably unethical, since the president is more or less saying that he gives scientists permission to continue to pursue therapeutic uses of ESCs as long as they continue to use cell lines that would be unethical to actual use therapeutically.

But of course this never comes up. Nor does the fact that it was politicians and pundits in the 80s that started using the term "embryo" for any stage past a fertilized egg; to an embryologist you have to progress considerably farther. Nor is mentioned that fertilization and conception are functionally two different stages; that women have eggs that are fertilized much more frequently than they conceive.

Of course ethics is about peoples opinions, but they need to have informed opinions. And for anyone to conflate the current debate over the expansion of ESC research with the advent of human cloning is particularly uninformed.