There's a fair bit of indignation in the media and 'round the blogosphere this week about Bush's replacement of two members of a bioethics council formed to advise him on thorny issues of reproduction and scientific research. Glenn Reynolds weighs in with a Tech Central Station column:
Why, indeed? A ban on this sort of research might condemn millions to unnecessary early death. It's certainly the sort of thing that ought to be debated in an election year. And that is sure to be. Does Bush want to be portrayed as the minion of religious extremists who'd stifle science even at the cost of lifesaving medical technologies? If he doesn't, then he's going about things all wrong.
Only in the western world is succumbing in late middle age to a disease like Parkinsons considered an "early death". Those lifesaving technologies being developed to treat disease of middle age are extraordinarily expensive. Our health systems are under huge funding pressures for a very simple reason - treatment technologies cost more to develop and deliver than the average health care consumer is actually worth as a taxpayer.
Research that crosses into the realm of human reproductiion and genetics requires careful monitoring and public debate. Bush is being accused of stacking the deck to place people on the panel who are more likely to give him advice he wants to hear. That's a fair enough criticism, and one I agree with, if true.
But I have noticed something odd about this particular poli-scientific debate. The media spin on this is, as usual, from the secular, liberal "default" position - "Bush is allowing his personal religious beliefs to obstruct important research, undermining American leadership in scientific advancement."
For the past decade, stunning advances in the field of genetic engineering of food crops have been realized - golden rice, engineered to produce pro-Vitamin A; Roundup Ready canola has allowed farmers to dramatically reduce the number of herbicides required. GMO wheat awaits approval. This excellent article in Atlantic Monthly summarizes the progress and the promise.
Yet, this promise is seriously threatened by fearmongering. Europe and Japan are invoking policies on GMO crops that suggest they are the minions of the environmental churches of Greenpeace and the Sierra Club.
Advances in agscience that can truly save millions from an early death and malnutrition, aid the preservation of environment and do so for pennies a person are being thwarted by European governments, mindful of Green party, environmental and consumer group influence. Proposed GMO labelling requirements and threats to close borders to transgenic crops effectively keeps many from becoming commercial.
Many of the same types who would criticize Bush for including religious opinion on a scientific panel debating the use of fetal cells - are those who refer to transgenic crops as "Frankenfood" .
Biblical scholars have no place in scientific discourse, but Mary Shelley does?
Update: David Bernstein explains my ambivilence about the appointments, and a lot better than I could
Some of us who have actually read the book read the "frankenfood" comment a little differently. We remember that in the book (unlike the movies), Frankenstein's creation wasn't evil/bad.
In Shelly's book, "angry villagers" were evil/bad as they lashed out in ignorance. Today's versions are playing much the same role.
Even if one insists on the movie version, Frankenstein wasn't that tough - he, together with several of his fellow "monsters", was defeated by Abbot and Costello.
Well, true enough, I suppose. But I don't think that the folks who coined the term were thinking of the deeper literary significance...
I share your ambivalence.
I also note that as one who is functionally atheist, and certainly no Christian, I have deep reservations about fetal stem cell research anyway. Guess it's just my wacky inner-fundamentalist creeping out. :-P
Neither religion nor works of fiction have any place in scientific discourse.
Not sure exactly what your veto encompasses, Kathy, but I could hardly say that ethics and the experience of fiction don't have any place at all in the debate. Fiction certainly informs outlook and worldview. (We don't dismiss, say, Orwell's fiction as irrelevant to thinking about political systems, so I'd hesitate to say there is no literature pertinent to thinking about science.)
As for ethics, it does matter in a debate about what is acceptable in research, and many people's ethical views are informed by their religious beliefs. Doesn't mean they get a veto on research, but they do have the right to bring their concerns to the debate. Not all religious opinion is as simple-minded as "we can't cuz God said so". (I'm advancing this as a general principle, not as a defense of the make-up of the council, which appears to deserve the current criticism.)
I'd also like to point out, as relevant to the ethics angle, and as someone who is not opposed to stem-cell research, how exasperated I am by the type of argument exemplified by the quote from Reynolds. I see this line of reasoning all the time; I would have thought it obvious that a reason for doing something is not a moral justification for doing something, but apparently I'm mistaken. ("Life-saving medical technologies" are not moral or immoral because they are life-saving medical technologies.)