Hope for Life in Pluripotent Stem Cells

There's an interesting article in Newsweek where a former member of President Bush's domestic policy staff expounds upon the hope of a scientific way around the ethical dilemma at the heart of the embryonic-stem-cell debate. The breakthrough procedure, known as "somatic cell dedifferentiation" would take an adult cell and turn it into the equivalent of an embryonic cell without the need for an embryo. In other words, the benefit of the research from embryonic stem cells would thus be accomplished without the destruction of human fetuses. Bush, for all his foibles, stood his ground in terms of his conviction that nascent human lives weren't to be terminated and sliced and diced for laboratory fodder, and he pushed strongly for the investment in this option which might lead to a perfect middle ground.

Flash forward to earlier this month, when President Obama found it fit to reverse President Bush's executive order and release the floodgates of funding for embryonic stem cell research. What President Obama failed to do is acknowledge, as the writer states, that ethics must be clear in firm because science is flexible, as demonstrated by these new advances. 

This is why I find it ridiculous when President Obama tries to self-righteously insist that scientific decisions must be "based on facts, not ideology" and that "dogma will no longer guide American policy." That's so incredibly disingenuous on so many levels. The reality is that facts themselves morally neutral, that's why you absolutely need ethics to guide scientific research. Nazi scientist Josef Mengele conducted ghastly experiments on Jews to determine, for example, the ability to survive certain amputations and chemical injections. At the end of the day the results of those experiments became fact. But those facts bear no moral compass on whether the experiments themselves were ethical or not.

And as for ideology and dogma? Let's be frank - the "new" policy around stem-cell research is absolutely driven by ideology and dogma. It's the ideology and dogma that a human embryo is not a life, and that the proliferation of death of human embryos is absolutely worth the chance that we'll find a cure for degenerative diseases. It's an ideology and dogma fully subscribed to by President Obama and his supporters.