Joseph Bottum begins...
It was a season of small demagogueries, a time of the easy lie and the useful exaggeration. A little shading of truth, a little twisting of facts—it was a political moment, in other words, and hardly anyone is naive enough to forget that partisan politics always has partisan purposes.
Bottum hits the nail on the head of what has happened over the last seven years as politics and science have have been fused together on embryonic stem cell research. He further comments...
Perhaps the recipe looks like this: Take the always-present human hunger for magic—for medicine as a kind of witchcraft, delivering thaumaturgical cures. Add the vague sense, shared by most people, that ever since the discovery of DNA’s double helix in 1953 we have been living in something like a golden age of biology. Include the strong sense, among political liberals, that religious believers must be discredited before they undo the abortion license. Now, wrap the whole thing up in money, the competition for trillions of dollars in research grants and the biotech companies’ stock dividends.
Who could forget this...
Research with embryonic stem cells would lead to “the greatest breakthrough in our or any lifetime,” Ronald Reagan’s son announced at the 2004 Democratic convention. “How’d you like to have your own personal biological repair kit standing by at the hospital? Sound like magic? Welcome to the future of medicine.” On and on, it went: speaker after speaker denouncing the heartless Republicans who were trying to block the path of medical magic, until, at last, the vice-presidential candidate John Edwards stood up in 2004, pointed down at the paralyzed actor Christopher Reeve, and proclaimed that a vote for the Democrats would mean that people like Reeve “are going to walk, get up out of that wheelchair and walk again.”
Edwards managed to combine the moods of faith healing, tent revivals, and partisan politics.
As late as January 2007, Pennsylvania’s liberal Republican senator Arlen Specter was declaring, “It is scandalous that eight years have passed since we have known about stem-cell research and the potential to conquer all known maladies, and federal funds have not been available for the research.”
Another example from Specter of the lethal mixture of Millennial expectations and partisan manipulation.
Even scientists were allowing political pandering to be injected in the scientific process...
In the summer before the 2004 presidential election, Ron McKay, from the National Institutes of Health, admitted that he and his fellow scientists had generally failed to correct the media’s false reports about the promise of stem cells—but that was all right, he told the Washington Post, since ordinary people “need a fairy tale.” They require, he said, “a story line that’s relatively simple to understand.”
For more examples, Bottum writes...
In a 2002 article in Nature, for example, Roger Pielke Jr. pointed to false stories—like one about the disabled rat in Australia that regained the ability to walk via tissues from aborted human fetuses—and declared that scientists’ ventures into the stem-cell debates “have given a black eye to the broader scientific enterprise.”
Or...
That same year, the researcher Alan Trounson added, “There are at least three or four other alternatives [to cloning and destroying embryos for pluripotent stem cells] that are more attractive already. . . . I can’t see why, then, you would argue for therapeutic cloning in the long term because it is so difficult to get eggs and you’ve got this issue of embryos as well.”
Or...
In January 2003, a science writer for the New York Times admitted: “For all the handwringing by scientists, you might think that therapeutic cloning is on the verge of curing a disease or two. . . . Almost all researchers, when questioned, confess that such accomplishments are more dream than reality.” Even Thomas Okarma, president of the Geron Institute, expressed some doubts: “The efficiency of making a stem-cell line from an embryo made by nuclear transfer [the technical name for cloning] is vanishingly small, and you’re going back to the case-by-case, individualized-therapy story again, with enormous costs.
Yet all the while John Kerry exalted...
“At this very moment, some of the most pioneering cures and treatments are right at our fingertips, but because of the stem-cell ban, they remain beyond our reach,” said Kerry. “To those who pray each day for cures that are now beyond our reach—I want you to know that help is on the way. I want you to hold on, and keep faith, because come next January, when John Edwards and I are sworn into office . . . we’re going to lift the ban on stem-cell research.”
Then a real scientific breakthrough....
Even at the time, however, the Japanese scientist Shinya Yamanaka was working with mice to show that fully pluripotent stem cells (cells having the qualities of those produced by destroying embryos) could be created directly from adult cells. Within a year, his study was significantly expanded by research groups. And on November 20, 2007, two independent teams published papers—one in the journal Cell, and the other in the journal Science—about the production of pluripotent human stem cells without using embryos or eggs or cloning. And with a silent thump, the topic suddenly fell off the front pages of the nation’s newspapers.
Embryo destruction became not only unnecessary but also less efficient than alternative methods. This breakthrough should have put the issue of embryonic stem cells off the political table. Now that human embryos are not needed the tone has sherply dropped from its utopian enthusiasms. James Thomson a well known stem-cell researcher announced shortly after the breakthrough discovery...
“A decade from now, this will be just a funny historical footnote...”
Bottum adds...
He may be right, but he shouldn’t be. We need to remember the events from 2001 to 2007, for the history of the stem-cell debate forms a classic study of what happens when politics and science find each other useful.
Sadly, in the politics of 2008, Michigan has a ballot to lift the state's current restrictions on embryonic stem cell reserach, and Obama has accused McCain of being against stem cell research. It appears that we are not quite over the strategy of abortion politics denial of real and useful science.
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