No Steam Over Stem Cell
I’ve tried for a couple of weeks now to get worked up. I mean, don’t we have a crisis of conscience on our hands: the sick versus the unborn?
Some folks are thinking we’ve arrived at another of those big moral forks in the road that will shape our society. Even the pope is in the thick of it, lobbying. But I look into the mirror. My face isn’t turning red. I check my pulse. Almost normal. Yawn.
When I hear voices raised about “embryonic stem cell research,” I think of two guys without the spare change for dinner, fistfighting about how to split their lottery millions if they win. In other words, shouldn’t we be talking about a larger question here?
Our president has tied himself up in knots over embryo cell research. Godlike, he has assumed the burden of deciding whether taxpayers back science or back away.
But a key fact remains. Research will continue, with or without U.S. government involvement. Also a fact: The mounting ethical quandaries of the New Biology are way too big and important to yield to the favor of a single man, even so preeminent a man as the president.
Bush’s verdict from on high will, in the short run, influence the pace and scale of medical research using cells from human embryos. It may also determine the extent to which the United States leads or follows the rest of the world for the next few years.
But that’s about all, because Bush has engaged a large subject on the narrowest of terms. He’s accepted this as just another round in the tiresome fight over abortion.
This is the wrong arena to conduct the conversation. I could tell you that I think stem cell research is, on balance, a sensible idea. I think we should devote the $400 million in tax money for the chance to ease human suffering. You can tell me why it’s a slippery slope. We all await the president, and then we’ll quarrel furiously about his wisdom. Losers will bide their time, hoping the next president will undo what this one has done.
Chiefly, this diverts our attention from a deeper concern on which most of us agree, or should: Modern biology is taking us into scary places. Science, by Einstein’s old definition, was the search for the truth of natural processes. Today, science has become the application of these truths to alter natural processes. Cloning is happening around us. Scientists are mixing witches’ brews of DNA, creating organisms with characteristics from other organisms, such as mice that glow in the dark with the addition of genes from bioluminescent organisms, or potatoes that are supposed to resist disease with the addition of a gene from a toad. At the Scripps Research Institute, scientists are trying to create life from the ground up, organisms that are entirely new to the planet.
I think back. Not so long ago when our first spaceship returned from the moon, NASA employed an air-lock quarantine for the sensible purpose of making sure that we would not introduce an alien organism into our environment. Today, organisms with alien properties are flying out of laboratories left and right.
Without serious ethical reflection, we have entrusted the free market to make decisions about the creation and manipulation of life. I’m waiting for the next gee-whiz futurist to tell me about DNA improvements in cattle so hamburgers will clean the grill while they cook.
I don’t think I’m alone when I say I’m torn between hope that biology will make the world better and fear that a Frankenstein slip-up will make it far worse. In opinion polls, a majority of us vacillate, depending on how the questions are phrased. I interpret this to mean that we have more to learn than to teach about the direction, or bounds, of our brave new world.
For instance, is it even possible to restrain human inquiry? If we look at the question through a theological prism, can we believe we were endowed with good hearts, curious minds and scientific capacity only as another temptation? Or should we be secular and ask, isn’t it true that if something can go wrong it will?
Our regulatory systems have not kept pace with the New Biology. Unapproved genetically altered corn has already shown up in our food. So how do we update our systems? Surely we cannot argue each development, like stem cell research, all the way to the White House, without overlooking 10,000 others. And don’t we have to seek agreement beyond our borders, beyond all borders?
George W. Bush could take this moment to enlarge our thinking about the promises and perils of science in a new millennium. Then I could get myself worked up good. Then we would be at a fork in the road.
