Stem Cell Squabble
By Eric Etheridge, NYTimes

March 13, 2009

President Obama signed an executive order on Monday lifting Bush administration limits on stem cell research, for which he has been predictably and vigorously attacked by those on the right who disagree with the change. At The Corner, National Review’s group blog, there have already been 16 posts in response, none positive.

But the president’s remarks on signing the new order — in which he said his administration would “make scientific decisions based on facts, not ideology” — have also generated criticism from a wider circle of writers, some of whom agree with his decision to pursue stem cell research more aggressively.

In Slate, Will Saletan said the tone of the president’s remarks on Monday rang similar in style to that of the last administration’s rhetoric on the war:

Proponents of embryo research are insisting that because we’re in a life-and-death struggle — in this case, a scientific struggle — anyone who impedes that struggle by renouncing effective tools is irrational and irresponsible. The war on disease is like the war on terror: Either you’re with science, or you’re against it.

In the Wall Street Journal, Robert P. George and Eric Cohen also took issue with the president’s assertion that he was getting politics out of the way of science:

Mr. Obama made a big point in his speech of claiming to bring integrity back to science policy, and his desire to remove the previous administration’s ideological agenda from scientific decision-making. This claim of taking science out of politics is false and misguided on two counts.

First, the Obama policy is itself blatantly political. It is red meat to his Bush-hating base, yet pays no more than lip service to recent scientific breakthroughs that make possible the production of cells that are biologically equivalent to embryonic stem cells without the need to create or kill human embryos. Inexplicably — apart from political motivations — Mr. Obama revoked not only the Bush restrictions on embryo destructive research funding, but also the 2007 executive order that encourages the National Institutes of Health to explore non-embryo-destructive sources of stem cells.

Second and more fundamentally, the claim about taking politics out of science is in the deepest sense antidemocratic. The question of whether to destroy human embryos for research purposes is not fundamentally a scientific question; it is a moral and civic question about the proper uses, ambitions and limits of science. It is a question about how we will treat members of the human family at the very dawn of life; about our willingness to seek alternative paths to medical progress that respect human dignity.

Yuval Levin, writing in The Washington Post, said that “in science policy, science informs, but politics governs, and rightly so.”

In a prior iteration of that debate, while he was serving in the Senate, Obama told reporters that “the promise that stem cells hold does not come from any particular ideology; it is the judgment of science, and we deserve a president who will put that judgment first.” This is a concise articulation of the technocratic temptation in science policy, reaffirmed by the president’s remarks yesterday. It argues not for an ethical judgment regarding the moral worth of human embryos but, rather, that no ethical judgment is called for: that it is all a matter of science.

This is a dangerous misunderstanding. Science policy questions do often require a grasp of complex details, which scientists can help to clarify. But at their core they are questions of priorities and worldviews, just like other difficult policy judgments.

At the New Republic, Jonathan Chait, who supports the new stem cell policy (”Indeed I find the contrary position difficult to fathom”), nonetheless thought Levin had a “fair point”:

[O]pposition to stem cell research isn’t necessarily opposition to science, it’s an ideological opposition to that particular application of science. There’s a temptation to categorize it with climate change denialism and the many ways the Bush administration overrode scientific research for political ends, but it really isn’t the same thing.

Kevin Drum, blogging at Mother Jones, agreed, arguing that the president is doing a disservice to other critical issues by pretending “that everything is a scientific issue.”

Politics is politics, and presidents always frame their decisions in ways they think will be the most acceptable to the most people. But this annoyed me when I read Obama’s statement yesterday, and I don’t blame Levin for being annoyed either. If you think an embryo is a human life — and lots of people do — then you’re going to be opposed to embryo research. If, like me, you don’t, then you’re not likely to have any objection. But although science can inform that debate, it can’t resolve it. Ethics and ideology will always be front and center.

I guess I wouldn’t care too much about this except that Obama also issued a memo yesterday about eliminating political interference with science. That’s important, and it applies to important subjects like global warming, habitat protection, GM foods, Plan B, and other things. But its impact is diluted if we pretend that everything is a scientific issue. There’s nothing wrong with admitting that both Bush’s stem cell decision and Obama’s have strong moral and ideological dimensions, and denying it tends to reduce our credibility when we insist on the underlying science of other issues that really are mostly scientific. In this case, honesty really is the best policy.

NYTimes