Kinsley on Stem Cells and Morally Unserious Conservatives

Michael Kinsley does a much better job than I do in explaining how morally unserious conservatives are when it comes to the issue of stem cells and frozen embryos.

More Handwringing

Of Obama's decision to reverse Bush's ban on federal funding for stem cell research, Yuval Levin has this to say:

...legitimate dispute underlies the stem cell debate. But that is not the ground on which the president made his case yesterday. He argued that to deny free rein to stem cell science is to ignore and reject the promise of science as such. In a barely concealed swipe at his predecessor, he pledged that his administration would "make scientific decisions based on facts, not ideology."

The executive order Obama signed omits any mention of ethical debate. The entirety of the case it makes for itself is that "advances over the past decade in this promising scientific field have been encouraging, leading to broad agreement in the scientific community that the research should be supported by Federal funds." And while Obama promised that his policy would be bound by ethical guidelines, he left it to the scientists of the National Institutes of Health to define the rules. The issue, he suggested, is a matter of science, not politics.

But science policy is not just a matter of science. Like all policy, it calls for a balancing of priorities and concerns, and it requires a judgment of needs and values that in a democracy we trust to our elected officials. In science policy, science informs, but politics governs, and rightly so.

There are, of course, different ways for politics to exert authority over science. To distort or hide unwelcome facts is surely illegitimate. But to weigh facts against societal priorities -- economic, political and ethical -- in making decisions is the very definition of policymakers' duty. And to govern the practice of scientific techniques that threaten to violate important moral boundaries is not only legitimate but in some cases essential.

Levin focuses on Obama's stem cell announcement, but what he says he's most upset about is this idea that science alone will dictate policy-making in the Obama administration. But where is the evidence for this? That Obama entirely avoids engaging in an ethical debate over the morality of stem cell research; Levin offers us this quote from when Obama was still serving in the Senate: "...the promise that stem cells hold does not come from any particular ideology; it is the judgment of science, and we deserve a president who will put that judgment first." To Levin this is succumbing to the "technocratic temptation", to let scientific experts make decisions that ought properly to be made via the democratic process.

I'm trying not to split hairs too finely here, but it seems to me that Obama has made an ethical determination, as indicated by that prior statement, and with this decision, to drop the ban on stem cell research; the decision being that there is no ethical debate to be had about the morality of funding such research. Levin says: "Science is a glorious thing, but it is no substitute for wisdom, prudence or democracy." But how is it not democratic for Obama to express this opinion prior to his election, be elected, and then enact his expressed opinion into law? Science has not over-ruled that democratic process; science has been affirmed by the democratic process. And I do not see how referring the determination of ethical guidelines for this research to a scientific organization like the National Institutes for Health is a subversion of the democratic process either. Scientists and ethicists draw up research guidelines all of the time, and if people object they may-in the form of Congress-rewrite those guidelines. But society has spoken broadly that this funding is acceptable.

Robert George and Eric Cohen are more direct, if also more disingenuous. They think that stem cell research will result in the deliberate creation and destruction of embryos that are the equivalent of living persons, and they're not happy about it:

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.

At least they give Obama credit for making a "political" and not merely scientific and technocratic decision (at least at first.) That said, the idea that this is "red meat" for the base is absurd. In a Gallup Poll conducted at the end of last month, 52% of respondents said that the government should either ease restrictions on funding for stem cell research, or lift restrictions altogether. 52% of the country is hardly a "base"; rather, it demonstrates that a lifting of the ban has broad support. But following all that, they do attack the decision for being "anti-democratic":

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.

Now obviously, what Obama was referring to with his desire to take the politics out of science, was the Bush administration's well known penchant for making even scientific decisions political. If federal agencies produced information indicating that global warming was both real and man-made, that information was to be suppressed to one extent or another. Abstinence-only sex education was held paramount, even though research indicates that it is less effective than sex education that teaches about safe sex. This is the sort of thing that Cohen and George seem to favor; the suppression of legitimate scientific inquiry and the politicization of scientific data to meet already agreed upon policy goals. But how is it more democratic to keep Americans ignorant, or unaware, or to hide scientific data that is unfavorable to powerful political interests even if it would be useful to Americans as a whole?

This argument is of course disingenuous and ridiculous. Cohen and George want the blatant politicization of science; they want stem cell research to be unfunded by the federal government even though most people desire it to some extent because they disagree with it, and their moral disapproval should be good enough for you because they're right about embryos and you're not. To offer some token and vacuous appreciation for the "stem-cell debate" at the end of their column, a debate they would continue to short-circuit if they were at all able to do so, is absurd.

Obama has announced a decision that will hopefully lead to scientific advances that will improve the lives of countless millions or billions the world over. He has announced that scientific inquiry will no longer be suppressed or perverted to meet moralistic policy goals. Americans are broadly supportive of this approach. This isn't anti-democratic; it's democracy at work.

Legislative Update VI

The House of Representatives passed a couple of bills this week. First, the chamber passed a bill would prohibit the interstate shipment of pet monkeys and other primates. A similar measure passed the House last year, but Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., raised procedural hurdles to block it in the Senate. House also passed a $410 spending bill allow smooth functioning of the government through the Sept. 30 end of the fiscal year. Bush administration restrictions on travel to Cuba were loosened in the legislation, to permit more frequent visits and expand the list of family members permitted to make trips to see relatives on the Communist nation-island.

The Senate finally got around to confirming Hilda Solis as the next Secretary of Labor, after Republicans had delayed the inevitable for weeks. Better yet, the Senate passed legislation that would give the D.C. Representative a vote in the House (right now, they can only vote on amendments, but not the final bill). The bill would increase the size of the House's membership to 247 because it would also add another seat for solid-red Utah (however, this could be reallocated in 2012 based on the census). The House itself should vote next week. Attached to the legislation was an amendment that would also repeal the District's ban on semiautomatic weapons, bar the city's registration requirements for most guns and drop criminal penalties for possessing an unregistered firearm, so this may cause an issue.

Lastly, a Senate bill has been re-introduced that would federal funding of embryonic stem cell research. President Bush previously vetoed the legislation and President Obama promised to overturn the limitations on the research Bush has set by executive order. However, the president and Democrats want a bill passed to prevent a future administration from simply changing the policy again.

Stem-Cell Research Advances

The Obama administration has committed itself to lifting restrictions on the federal funding of stem-cell research, and scientists are already beginning to anticipate the results.

FDA Approves Stem Cell Tests on Humans

In what will hopefully open a new era of science and medicine, the FDA has approved of a study that will test embryonic stem cells on adults with severe spinal cord injuries, in the hopes of regrowing damaged or destroyed nerve cells.

Stem Cell Advance

Last week scientists reported that they had cloned a primate and were successfully able to harvest stem cells from the cloned embryo, raising the possibility that the same procedure could be carried out in human. Today the Washington Post reports that researchers have been able to turn human skin cells into cells similar to embryonic stem cells:

The unencumbered ability to turn adult cells into embryonic ones capable of morphing into virtually every kind of cell or tissue, described in two scientific journal articles to be released today, has been the ultimate goal of researchers for years. In theory, it would allow people to grow personalized replacement parts for their bodies from a few of their own skin cells, while giving researchers a uniquely powerful means of understanding and treating diseases.

As news of the success by two different research teams spread by e-mail, scientists seemed almost giddy at the likelihood that their field, which for its entire life has been at the center of so much debate, may suddenly become like other areas of biomedical science: appreciated, eligible for federal funding and wide open for new waves of discovery.

"These are enormously important papers," said George Q. Daley, a stem cell researcher at Children's Hospital Boston, who was not involved in the work. Like others, he spoke with stunned elation reminiscent of scientists' reactions in 1997 to the cloning of Dolly the sheep from a skin cell, the first proof that adult mammal cells could have their genetic clocks turned back.

Their enthusiasm notwithstanding, scientists warned that medical treatments are not immediately at hand. The new method uses genetically engineered viruses to transform adult cells into embryo-like ones, and those viruses can trigger tumors.But the cells will be instantly useful for research purposes -- "to move a patient's disease into a Petri dish," as Daley put it. And some scientists predicted that, with the basic secret now in hand, it could be a mere matter of months before virus-free methods for making the versatile cells are found.

This development is absolutely incredible. It goes beyond what the cloned primate researchers did, which was to replace the nucleus of a fertilized egg with the nucleus of an adult primate skin cell. Instead, these scientists utilized a retrovirus to transform a human adult skin cell-as if by magic-into a cell that has many of the same characteristics of an embryonic stem cell, thus eliminating the need to use a fertilized embryo at all and skipping the most contentious step in the stem cell debate. The cells are not exactly the same as embryonic stem cells, but they're close, enabling researchers to utilize them for further research even as the debate over the use of embryonic stem cells continues.

Primates Cloned

Scientists have successfully cloned primates to produce embryos that they harvested for stem cells, as announced by the journal Nature yesterday:

Not only is this the first time such cells have been produced in any animal other than a mouse, but the method, the researchers say, should also work in humans. In 2004, South Korean researchers reported making stem cells from cloned human embryos, but the claim turned out fraudulent.

“We hope the technology will be useful for other labs that are working on human eggs and human cells,” the lead researcher of the group, Shoukhrat Mitalipov at Oregon Health and Science University in Beaverton, said in a telephone interview. “I am quite sure it will work in humans.”

The monkey stem cells were genetically identical to an adult monkey, Semos, whose cells were cloned. They are a sort of universal cell that can, in theory, develop into any tissue or organ.

The scientists began by removing skin cells from a 9-year-old adult male rhesus macaque and inserted them, along with all their genes, into monkey eggs whose genetic material had been removed.

The egg, in a part of the cloning process that remains mysterious, reprogrammed the genes from the skin cells, bringing them back to the state they were in when embryo development begins.

The reprogrammed genes took over developing the eggs. A result was monkey embryos that were genetically identical — clones — of the adult male monkey. A few days later, the investigators extracted stem cells from the embryo clones, destroying the embryos in the process.

In other words the point was to produce a genetically idential primate to the one whose skin sample was taken, but rather to produce a viable embryo from which stem cells could be taken, and on this scientists scored a success. Similar methods in the past have failed repeatedly, leading some to believe that primates couldn't be cloned. But barriers to the technique have been removed, and while the process still only produced one viable stem cell line from 304 eggs, there appears to be no reason at this time why the effort cannot be duplicated by other researchers.

As the article states, this has stoked fears that human cloning is just around the corner. Dr. Art Caplan, Director for the Center of Bioethics at Pennyslvania University, says we shouldn't be unduly worried about this possibility:

The Oregon announcement is very welcome news if you suffer from diabetes, nerve damage, paralysis or heart failure. Cloning human embryos using the Oregon technique should jump-start embryonic stem cell research using your own cells to get the process going.

Some will argue that none of this research should be permitted in humans. Won't cloning human embryos make it too tempting to use them for reproduction as well as research? And isn't it murder, some will say, to clone human embryos to then destroy them to harvest stem cells from them. Neither argument carries sufficient weight for politicians and governments to ban cloning for research.

While it is true that the creation of stem cells means destroying a cloned embryo, a cloned embryo in a lab dish has no ability to develop into a person. It is at best a possible person -not an actual one. Moreover, we already know that nearly all cloned embryos are so miswired that very few are capable of becoming a healthy adult organism at all, making cloned human embryos far more ethical to use for embryonic stem cell research than human embryos created solely for research purposes.

It has taken 10 years but the prospect of human cloning has now inched very close to becoming a reality. We don't need to panic in response to this prospect. We need to proceed with great caution. While we may not want to use cloning as a way to make people we should create laws and policies that permit the use of cloning to help create the cells that can heal and repair the people who are already here.

Overall, I agree with Caplan. Given the potential benefits this procedure could have for people suffering all kinds of genetic and degenerative diseases, it would be immoral to turn away from such research out of the interest of preserving embryos, especially when many of the embryos that would be used for this research could come from the estimated 400,000 embryos that are estimated to be frozen in the United States but for which there is little hope of being used. And fears of reproductive human cloning are exaggerated. Scientists don't know whether a cloned embryo could produce a fully developed and healthy human being, and the wouldn't conduct experiments to find out give the wildly unethical nature of such experiments.

At the same time, I do think it's time for legislation regarding both therapeutic and reproductive cloning. The only thing approaching a federal standard is the ban on federal funds being used on stem cell research, but measures banning reproductive cloning have failed. Most states haven't addressed the issue either, and those that have take differing views; California voted to support stem-cell research, but in Louisiana frozen embryos more than four days old are considered to be as fully human as borne children.

Unfortunately because of the delay in implementing sensible legislation and this new discovery, the political debate surrounding such legislation is likely to be heated, confused and hyperbolic. It would have been better to take the matter seriously while we could still anticipate such developments, and not merely react to them. But now is better than never.

Legislative Update

President Bush today vetoed another bill to expand federally backed embryonic stem cell research. It was the third veto of Bush’s presidency, and the second time he has vetoed embryonic stem cell research legislation that passed with bi-partisan majorities in both Houses (but sadly, not enough to override) and is supported by nearly 70% of Americans in most polls. However, some lawmakers are discussing adding an embryonic stem cell research provision to a future spending bill.

The House today approved plans to halt funding for the development of a new generation of nuclear warheads, eliminating about $82 million for continuing development of the Reliable Replacement Warhead program. The House also passed a bill that would give the Justice Department more than $100 million for new prosecutors, FBI agents and other resources to revisit unsolved murders from the civil rights era. The bill passed by a margin of 422-2. The bill is named in honor of Emmett Till, a black teenager from Chicago who was beaten and murdered in Mississippi in 1955 after being accused of whistling at a white woman. His killers were never convicted.

Also, in an effort that compliments plans in the Senate, House Democrats are readying another series of votes on Iraq, including a motion to deauthorize the war, that could come to the floor as early as July, Roll Call reports. Rep. Jim Moran said he expects the fiscal 2008 bill to contain measures including the prohibition of permanent bases in Iraq as well as the invasion of Iran.

Next Tuesday, the Senate is expected to vote on the Employee Free Choice Act. In early March, the House passed the bill, which makes it easier for employees to join a union, with a 241-185 vote. However, despite unanimous Democratic support, Republicans will likely have the votes to keep it from reaching the 60-vote hurdle to invoke cloture and pass the bill. The White House has also previously issued a veto threat. Harold Meyerson over at The Washington Post details why it is ridiculous for Republicans to oppose this and also oppose immigration reform, which the Senate will debate again soon, on pro-labor grounds.