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Too Many Eggs
Columnist Kathleen Parker, Used by permission of the authorClearly Caring Magazine, 2nd Quarter 2009, Vol. 29, No. 2
Editor’s Note: The Dickey-Wicker Amendment, a provision passed by Congress annually since 1996, prohibits the use of federal funds to support research “in which human embryos are created, destroyed, discarded, or knowingly be subjected to risk of injury or death.” The Obama action on embryonic stem cells still does not allow scientists to use federal money to destroy embryos for their stem cells. It does, however, open the door for members of Congress to take steps to overturn the Dickey-Wicker ban and modify long-standing protections for unborn children in the embryonic stage.
As he lifted the ban on federal funding for embryonic stem cell research Monday [March 9, 2009], President Barack Obama proclaimed that scientific decisions now will be made “on facts, not ideology.” This sounds good, but what if there were other nonideological facts that Obama seems to be ignoring? One fact is that since Obama began running for president, researchers have made some rather amazing
strides in alternative stem cell research.
Science and ethics finally fell in love, in other words, and Obama seems to have fallen asleep during the kiss. Either that, or he decided that keeping an old political promise was more important than acknowledging new developments. In the process, he missed an opportunity to prove that he is proscience but also sensitive to the concerns of taxpayers who don’t want to pay for research that requires embryo destruction.
Unfortunately, the stem cell debate has been characterized as a conflict between science (as though science is always right) and religious “kooks” (as though religious folks are never right).
Moreover, as Obama said, the majority of Americans have reached a consensus that we should pursue this research. Polling confirms as much, but most Americans, including most journalists and politicians, aren’t fluent in stem cell research. It’s complicated. If people “know” anything, it is that embryonic stem cells can cure diseases and that all stem cells come from fertility clinic embryos that will be discarded anyway. Neither belief is entirely true.
In fact, every single one of the successes in treating patients with stem cells thus far - for spinal cord injuries and multiple sclerosis, for example - have involved adult or umbilical cord blood stem cells, not embryonic. And though federal dollars still won’t directly fund embryo destruction, federally funded researchers can obtain embryos privately created only for experimentation. Thus, taxpayers now are incentivizing a market for embryo creation and destruction.
The insistence on using embryonic stem cells always rested on the argument that they were pluripotent, capable of becoming any kind of cell. That superior claim no longer can be made with the spectacular discovery in 2007 of “induced pluripotent stem cells” (iPS), which was the laboratory equivalent of the airplane. Very simply, iPS cells can be produced from a skin cell by injecting genes that force it to revert to its primitive “blank slate” form with all the same pluripotent capabilities of embryonic stem cells.
Time magazine named iPS innovation No. 1 on its “Top 10 Scientific Discoveries” of 2007, and the journal Science rated it the No. 1 breakthrough of 2008.
Many scientists, of course, want to conduct embryonic stem cell research, as they have and always could with private funding. One may agree or disagree with their purposes, but one also may question why taxpayers should have to fund something so ethically charged when alternative methods are available.
Good people can disagree on these things, but those who insist that this is “only about abortion” miss the point. The objectification of human life is never a trivial matter. And determining what role government plays in that objectification may be the ethical dilemma of the century.
In this case, science handed Obama a gift – and he sent it back.
Kathleen Parker is one of America’s most popular syndicated columnists, appearing in more than 350 newspapers. Her column is syndicated nationally by The Washington Post Writers Group. Parker is a consulting faculty member at the Buckley School.
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