This story details what we have heard before: The private money is voting with their closed checkbooks about the prospects for the near and mid range futures of embryonic stem cell research and therapeutic cloning. Issues of uncertainty of the technology, patent disputes, the continuing moral controversy, etc., is keeping the private money from investing in massive quantities. If this were half as sure a thing as some ESCR advocates imply, or sometimes state, you would have to beat the private money away with a stick.
On the surface, that is why Big Biotech is spending millions on a propaganda juggernaut to convince state taxpayers to give their hard-earned tax dollars to private companies and their university business partners to do the research. In CA, under Proposition 71, there is supposed to be a payback to the state if the research turns to gold. But get this: It only applies if the grant recipient is a public entity like a university. Money given to the private sector is a pure gift. Talk about pork: Snort! Snort!
But despite states now ponying up billions in funding over the next decade—evan as infrastructures collapse around their ears—we will still hear that the feds need to cough up hundreds of millions more, so much so, that it will be hard to spend it all. Which is puzzling—unless it really isn’t just about the money. You see, saying no to federal funding means that the official public policy of the country holds that it is wrong to destroy human life in research, and moreover, to make human life for that purpose. Allowing open funding, would give the moral stamp of approval of the country. Thus, in the end, it seems to me that this dispute is less about the money and more about whose values and ethics ultimately will control society as we move into the biotech century.
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