What the Bush Stem Cell Policy is Really All About

Let us pull back for a moment and ponder the embryonic stem cell debate. What has it been over as a matter of government regulation? Not whether it could be done legally. There are no federal efforts to outlaw ESCR. The debate isn’t even about whether the U.S. taxpayers should foot the bill for human ESCR. It already does, to the tune of about $50 million per year. The issue is more narrow than that: Whether the federal government should pay for ESCR in which embryos are destroyed with the expectation of receiving federal research funds thereafter (e.g, the Clinton approach).

That would not seem to be grounds for the issue to become such a big international Magilla. And in my view, it isn’t. The reason the issue has become so huge is that it isn’t really about the science, it isn’t about the money, and it isn’t about the potential for CURES! CURES! CURES!. It is about what it means to be human and indeed, whether that designation has any intrinsic importance at all.

The way I see it, when President Bush refused to okay both the federal government paying for the destruction of embryos for use in ESCR and for stem cell research in which the embryos were destroyed in anticipation of receiving federal grants, he powerfully conveyed a simple but profound message: Being human matters. It is important. Even the earliest developing human beings, at their most nascent stages, have moral value. And that assertion sets some people into orbit because it means that there are limits, and even more controversially, because President Bush is stating that science is not the be all and end all of what is right, just, and important in society.

Bush’s policy has also unleashed a tremendous amount of creative thinking that seek to obtain all the benefits hoped for in ESCR and human research cloning, but without the tremendous ethical cost. My friend Bill Hurlbut and others are promoting altered nuclear transfer (ANT) as a potential way to obtain pluripotent cells without creating or destroying embryos. Some Japanese scientists have regressed rat skin cells back to an embryonic state, which could mean that every therapeutic hope asserted for cloning could be achieved through entirely ethical and uncontroversial means. Scientists want to work with embryos that have died. And this new proposal by a U.S. Senator, about which I do not yet take a position, urges that we use embryos that cannot possibly develop due to defects, for obtaining ES cells.

These and other proposals offer the potential to bridge the gap between naked science and what many see as an ethical imperative. None of it would have happened, in my view, had not one politician retained the courage of his convictions. But for President Bush’s stem cell funding policy, I am convinced that by now scientists would be learning how to do human cloning on the federal dime, and we would be arguing about the propriety of using late stage embryos and early fetuses in biotechnological research.

We still may have that argument someday. But to get from here to there, we have to agree that nascent human life doesn’t matter much at all. President Bush is standing in the way of that meme. And that is the real reason why a mere funding policy has sparked so much flame and fury.