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Moral arguments come up short in stem cell debate

Almost no one was surprised last week when US President Barack Obama lifted restrictions on stem cell research that involved the destruction of human embryos. Even jaded Washington watchers are adjusting to the idea that this is a president with an eerie determination to do exactly what he said he would do during his campaign.

Those who approve such research applauded Obama's action. Those who disapprove condemned it. But some commentary focused at least as much on the nature of the president's moral argument as on the specific conclusions he reached.

When it comes to the controversy over human embryonic stem cell research, moral argument has not been much in evidence. The president spoke of a popular consensus in favor of it reached “after much discussion, debate and reflection.” That is a kindly description of the hype, exaggeration and denunciation that have dominated the controversy.

Politicians, scientists and Hollywood stars conjured up visions of cures of biblical proportions. One member of the House of Representatives equated opposition to embryonic stem cell research with refusing “a cure for your child’s cancer.” Another called such opposition “a sentence of death of millions of Americans.”

Not long after the death of former US president Ronald Reagan, his younger son, Ron, told delegates at the 2004 Democratic convention to imagine “your own personal biological repair kit standing by at the hospital.”

“Sound like magic?” Reagan said. “Welcome to the future of medicine.”

Scientists who knew better kept quiet.

“People need a fairy tale,” Ronald McKay, a stem cell researcher at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, explained to the Washington Post in 2004.

Recently, Nicholas Wade in the Science section of the New York Times summed this all up: “Members of Congress and advocates for fighting diseases have long spoken of human embryonic stem cell research as if it were a sure avenue to quick cures for intractable afflictions. Scientists have not publicly objected to such high-flown hopes, which have helped fuel new sources of grant money like the US$3 billion initiative in California for stem cell research.

“In private, however,” the article continued, “many researchers have projected much more modest goals for embryonic stem cells.”

Last Monday, Obama certainly avoided the worst of this recent history. He warned twice against overstating the promise of stem cell research, even if he did envision “a day when words like ‘terminal’ and ‘incurable’ are finally retired from our vocabulary.”

More important, he acknowledged that “thoughtful and decent people” opposed this research, and he claimed to “understand their concerns.” His own view was that “with proper guidelines and strict oversight, the perils can be avoided.”

What were those “concerns” that Obama understood or those “perils” that he would avoid? The president did not say. So one could object that his moral argument stopped in mid-air. How can one evaluate what he called “a difficult and delicate balance” when it is not clear exactly what is being balanced?

The more challenging objection — again, not to the president’s specific stance on embryonic stem cell research, but to the general form of his argument — went directly to a theme running through his announcement and echoed in enthusiastic comments from research proponents:

Science, it was said, should be isolated from politics, from ideology, from dogma, from religion.

Sounds good if all one means is that the current administration will treat science with more respect than many people believe its predecessor did. Sounds good if all one means by politics is partisan maneuvering or by ideology, dogma and religion, some form of blind belief unwilling to engage alternative viewpoints.

But these words frequently function as weapons. One person’s ideology can be someone else's political philosophy or even morality. One person's dogma can be someone else's self-evident truths. And politics is the way that people decide how they will live together, by what moral standards and to what ends.

Historians, sociologists and scientists themselves have generated a small library of books demonstrating how much of science has been driven and shaped by politics and ideology — and economics, too — all the while imagining that it was value-free, “just the facts,” as Sergeant Friday (from the old Dragnet TV show) and perhaps Obama would say.

Science has certainly developed safeguards to isolate its work from distorting influences. The danger is that those safeguards, like antibodies run amok, can also isolate it from morality.

Two days after Obama's announcement, the New York Times ran three science-related articles. One was about stem cell researchers worried that any new federal financing might prove insufficient. It also ran an article about a prolific medical researcher who admitted fabricating research that just happened to support the products of the pharmaceutical company underwriting the research. Both were reminders of how much science is affected by big money.

And the paper ran a page 1 article about European nations' debating whether surgical or chemical castration is an effective, humane and legitimate treatment to rehabilitate violent sex offenders. No one can read that article and imagine that this is simply a scientific question, to be resolved by medical scientists on their own terms, rather than one that is profoundly moral and political.

Is that any less true when it comes to not only human embryonic stem cell research but also a host of other ethically fraught, knotty scientific questions now challenging Americans?
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