Alright, I don't believe that. But it seems that a lot of people do. Well, maybe that's not right. If you asked them if they believed it, they'd probably tell you "No, of course not," but the way people talk about Stem Cell research gives me pause.
Science primarily produces knowledge, and knowledge isn't the sort of thing you can really destroy once it has been created. This is an inconvenient reality in the military world, which is why we're so keen to stop the proliferation of nuclear weapons, though we have been remarkably unsuccessful on that score. The nuclear "club" now includes an increasingly unstable Pakistan and a frighteningly nutty North Korea Its newest aspiring member is a malicious Iran. American and European efforts have been unavailing, and Russia has done nothing but encourage the nuclearization of the Islamic state. Acquiring the Bomb seems inevitable--that is, if Israel doesn't do something drastic soon.
The peace-seeking Left of American politics has been forced to face the reality that the nuclear cat is out of the bag; we just can't turn the clock back to a time when nobody had nukes.
Do we want to find ourselves in a similar position on the stem-cell issue? Will we wind up in a similar situation? I don't know. But I'm convinced that some doors should be closed to science. Deciding precisely which doors to close is of course the role of ethics. And ethics is precisely the sort of thing that science can say absolutely nothing about. Science can tell us a good bit about what is, but it can't say a word about what ought to be. That's why I find the following statement from Time so troubling:
But Monday's Executive Order is less about pitting the promise of one type of stem cell against another's and more about re-establishing the authority of science, of ensuring that any and every potentially useful avenue of research will be pursued to its end. [emphasis added]
What authority? Science can tell us merely whether embryonic stem-cell technologies will perform the functions we hope they will perform. It cannot say with authority whether such technologies will provide benefits that outweight the costs (moral and otherwise) of developing them.
But let's dispense with the lie Time repeats: President Bush's executive order did not ban stem cell research, embryonic or otherwise. It prevented the use of federal money to create human embryos for stem-cell research purposes. That's all. It didn't "ban" any research, it didn't stop research on existing embryonic stem cell lines, even. Here, read Executive Order 13435 and see what it is that Obama reversed two days ago.
The business of ethics and responsibility is to decide which lines of research should be pursued. This is precisely what George W. Bush did in his executive order, but he restricted his order to those things over which he had control--namely the discretionary expenditure of federal funds (that's what executives are responsible for doing).
Why do I carp about this, now that there's nothing I can do about it, really? Because ignorance would appear to be the reigning problem in America on the subject. Yuval Levin notes that polling on the subject is really tricky because people don't really know what they're being asked. As evidence, he argues:
Consider these two questions from our poll, asked of the very same people just moments apart:The social, economic and personal costs of the diseases that embryonic stem cells have the potential to treat are greater than the costs associated with the destruction of embryos.
54% TOTAL AGREE
39% TOTAL DISAGREEAnd
An embryo is a developing human life, therefore it should not be destroyed for scientific or research purposes.
62% TOTAL AGREE
33% TOTAL DISAGREE
I'd say there's a significant problem here, and it has to do with the knowledge of the respondents. In the end, it isn't just the president's job to be responsible and ethical when it comes to science. It's the job of scientists, scientific foundations, science ethicists, and indeed the rest of us who stand to benefit from ethical science.
President Obama has done an irresponsible and popular thing. (Note that it's always easier to be irresponsible when that happens also to be popular.) But this issue--the ethical question of benefitting from the destruction of human embryos created specifically for the purpose of harvesting their pluripotent stem-cells--is not just on the president's desk. It's on everyone's desk. We should educate and teach and preach and argue morality and responsibility with respect to human life.
That's the purpose of this posting, and it's why I hope the public discussion of bioethics and embryonic stem-cells continues in the wake of the order Obama has issued. The struggle for human life will never be finally won; it is a struggle that every generation must take up.
UPDATE: Kathleen Parker has a piece up about what works and what doesn't. It's worth a read.
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