The Stem Cell Debates: Lessons for Science and Politics
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In December 1994, a committee that advises the director of the National Institutes of Health met on the NIH campus in Bethesda, Maryland. The meeting focused on the recent recommendation of the NIH’s Human Embryo Research Panel that the federal government should fund a range of research involving human embryos.
The chairman of the panel told the committee about the “extremely high level of public ignorance” about human reproduction, which “invites exploitation by those who, for moral reasons, object to human embryo research.”
That ignorance, he warned, could be “manipulated into public hostility” toward embryo research.
The conversation became frankly political, as several committee members voiced concern that the incoming Republican majority in the U.S. Congress would restrict funding for the research, including expected developments with human embryonic stem cells. The committee began to brainstorm ways to shape the policy and influence public reaction so that embryo research could receive government funding with minimum opposition. One committee member proposed a sophisticated strategy of political lobbying: “have us do our homework to determine which people in Congress … have family members with which particular illnesses and make individual visits to them to ‘background’ them and brief them and discuss their particular family history concerns. Scientists would respond to ethical objections against the destruction of nascent human life by entering the political arena; to make their case, they would rely not only on scientific facts but on emotionally charged appeals.
Fast-forward a dozen years. Embryo research became a hot-button political issue, and strikingly, just as had been anticipated in 1994, public officials and candidates for office regularly spoke about the issue in terms of their family health problems. So it was that, in considering legislation to fund embryonic stem cell research in April 2007, a series of Senators, one after another, described illnesses suffered by relatives, constituents, and themselves — a parade of maladies, from cancer to Parkinson’s to diabetes to asthma. One Senator, explaining his vote in favor of using taxpayer dollars to fund embryonic stem cell research, recounted his mother’s physical and mental decline due to Alzheimer’s disease: “When I look at her empty gaze and shriveled body, I cannot help but wonder, if we had started embryonic stem cell research years ago, would she still be suffering today?” While these Senators understandably focused on the face of the suffering that might be relieved if human embryos were destroyed for the sake of delivering a panoply of hoped-for cures, the imperative to relieve suffering was never in dispute, and they failed entirely to attend to the nature of the human embryo and its moral status — the ethical issue that was the very center of the debate.