ESCR: The Real Agenda Behind the Hype and Money

This strong editorial written by mainstream bioethicist Jonathan Moreno and colleagues at the well-funded and very left-leaning think tank, Center for American Progress, call for the overturning of President Bush’s funding restrictions, giving several reasons for their call. The authors grouse that only some 20% of public funding of stem cell research goes to embryonic approaches and that the Bush policy causes researchers to engage in unnecessary redundancies to keep approved and disapproved stem cell lines separate.

Fair enough, I suppose. But much of this has to do with ethical controversies seen as significant to tens of millions of people, worries that the authors care about not a whit, as well as insufficient existing infrastructure, patent disputes that impede research, and the number of qualified grant applications received by the NIH. Moreover, the success of adult stem cell research—already in human trials in many areas—may also have much to do with this. Do the authors suggest diverting funds from research already showing great signs of success and into the more speculative, not to mention, controversial realms? It would seem so.

But this proposal for federal action really gave me a (bitter) laugh. Moreno and friends advocate:

The federal government should act quickly to create uniform regulatory guidelines and standards for stem cell research. Those guidelines should closely match those proposed in the National Academies (of Sciences) Guidelines for Human Embryonic Stem Cell Research.

Of course they do, since the NAS approach is essentially “anything goes,” including creating natural and cloned embryos for use and destruction in stem cell research—as I detailed here in the Weekly Standard.

Here’s the bottom line: The Feed Me $! crowd will never be happy until ESCR and human cloning are fully funded by the Feds and states, with no meaningful limitations on what can be done experimentally, and no more grousing about the moral value of nascent human life. They will not rest until those of us who worry about using embryos—and eventually cloned fetuses—as mere corn crops ripe for the harvest are marginalized to the sidelines so that the Brave New World project can really get into gear.

There is a lot of money pushing this advocacy, including for the CAP Bioethics Project. The mainstream media is completely in the tank. All the advocacy money has spooked politicians into stampede mode. States are competing with each other to see which can throw the most taxpayer dollars at this morally contentious and speculative research—based primarily on business concerns.

But in the end, I don’t believe this controversy is really about the proper levels of public funding or the bother of having to use older stem cell lines in federally supported embryonic stem cell research. These are merely stalking horses for the real issue that drives nearly every bioethical controversy we examine here at SHS: Which value system—sanctity/equality of life or explicit/implied utilitarianism—will ultimately prevail in determining our values, our laws, and our private and public modes of conduct.