Charles Krauthammer, the Washington Post columnist who favored ESCR funding but also saw that the scientists would never be satisfied with being limited to leftover embryos, has a column on the great iPSC breakthrough. He writes (prematurely in my view) that “the great stem cell debate is over:”
Which allows a bit of reflection on the storm that has Bush got it right. Not because he necessarily drew the line in the right place. I have long argued that a better line might have been drawn—between using doomed and discarded fertility-clinic embryos created originally for reproduction (permitted) and using embryos created solely to be disassembled for their parts, as in research cloning (prohibited). But what Bush got right was to insist, in the face of enormous popular and scientific opposition, on drawing a line at all, on requiring that scientific imperative be balanced by moral considerations.raged ever since the August 2001 announcement of President Bush’s stem cell policy. The verdict is clear: Rarely has a president—so vilified for a moral stance—been so thoroughly vindicated…
Bush got it right. Not because he necessarily drew the line in the right place. I have long argued that a better line might have been drawn—between using doomed and discarded fertility-clinic embryos created originally for reproduction (permitted) and using embryos created solely to be disassembled for their parts, as in research cloning (prohibited). But what Bush got right was to insist, in the face of enormous popular and scientific opposition, on drawing a line at all, on requiring that scientific imperative be balanced by moral considerations.
A willingness to draw moral lines is going to become increasingly important as life sciences gain power once consigned to the gods. I think atomic energy is a rough, but good analogy. Like the current strides being made in biology and biotechnology (think artificial viruses, for example), the tremendous scientific gains made by physicists in unlocking the atom unleashed great potential for both tremendous good and catastrophic evil. Yet, nobody said in the face of that awesome power, as Senator Specter did the other day about stem cell research, that science should be “unfettered.” Rather, all agreed that at least some parameters had to be placed around the use of atomic energy and we have since engaged in long and sometimes bitter debates about the extent to which we should use our knowledge and ability to make uses out of the atom. Like the debate over stem cell research, that is right and proper in a democratic society.
For those who think that Krauthammer can’t know what it’s like to be sick or is ignorant of the science, or must be religious: He is a secularist, a physician, psychiatrist, and near-quadriplegic from a spinal cord injury.
Read the whole column. It is well worth your time.
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