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Wednesday, Nov 25, 2009
Medical research is poised to make a quantum leap that will benefit sufferers from Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, muscular dystrophy, diabetes and other diseases. But George W. Bush's religious convictions stand in its way.
Mar 25, 2004 | Late in the afternoon on the last Friday in February, Elizabeth Blackburn received a surprise phone call from an aide in the personnel office of the White House. Since early 2002, Blackburn, a distinguished cell biologist at the University of California at San Francisco, had served on the President's Council on Bioethics, the panel President Bush convened to explore the charged boundaries between ethics and cutting-edge biomedical science. On the council, Blackburn was sometimes critical of the Bush administration's restrictive policies on embryonic stem cell research; now, the White House staffer told Blackburn, the council was letting her go. The aide gave no explanation for the decision.
Blackburn was not technically "fired" from the bioethics council -- she was just not reappointed for the council's new term. But Blackburn was one of only two members on the 17-person panel to suffer that fate -- and it turned out that the other member not asked back, William May, an emeritus professor of ethics at Southern Methodist University, had been planning to retire anyway. For Blackburn, the cause of the abrupt dismissal was obvious. "I think this is Bush stacking the council with the compliant," she told the Washington Post that afternoon, the first of many instances over the next few weeks in which she publicly accused Bush and the bioethics council of playing politics with science.
To critics of the Bush administration, Blackburn's analysis of the situation sounded unimpeachable. George W. Bush's unhappy relationship with science has been well documented. Indeed, just a week before Blackburn was let go, 60 prominent scientists -- including 20 Nobel laureates -- accused the president of routinely mangling scientific fact in the service of "partisan political ends." So just about everyone concluded that Elizabeth Blackburn was the latest victim of the Bush administration's partisan attacks on science. The story line was simple and compelling: Blackburn was a proponent of embryonic stem cell research, while Bush -- and his most ardent supporters -- was not. During a campaign stop shortly after Blackburn's dismissal, likely Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry told reporters, "A scientific panel ought to be chosen on the basis of science and on the basis of reputation, not politics."
The problem is that this simple story line is almost certainly wrong. Interviews with several members of the council -- including its chairman, University of Chicago ethicist Leon Kass -- and, more important, a review of its meetings and reports on stem cell research show Blackburn's charges of partisanship to be weak. It's not at all clear that Blackburn was dismissed for her views, rather than for her performance on the council (she was, for starters, serially absent from meetings, missing about half, more than any other member). And the council's reports -- particularly its lengthy inquiry into stem cell research, which the council released in January -- bear none of the biases she has accused the council of harboring.
The reshuffling of the President's Council on Bioethics is probably not, in other words, just another in a long line of Bush's scientific misdeeds. The real story of the bioethics council, the one that's been lost in the hail of political accusations, is that it has done some fascinating and admirable work -- and rather than letting the president off the hook, the council's report on stem cell research actually highlights the unsustainability of Bush's policy.
In its deliberations on embryonic stem cell research, the council has framed the issue as one offering no middle ground. There is no safe position in this debate, the council's report suggests: You either believe that very early-stage human embryos -- embryos that are just several days old -- deserve special "moral consideration" and should not be used for research, or you do not. You either believe that destroying these embryos is justified in order to realize the medical miracles that researchers say are possible with stem cells, or you do not. Bush has made clear that he believes embryos must not be destroyed. What's interesting is that his own council indicates that by the logic of Bush's position, the president will have a hard time ever changing or expanding his policy -- even in the face of amazing new advances -- without abandoning what he says is his considered moral position.
To scientists in the field, it's obvious that the president's current policy allowing for federal funding of research on only a small number of stem cell lines -- a policy conceived as a safe middle ground -- is quickly becoming untenable. Every day, researchers using private funding sources, and researchers in other countries, are making strides in stem cell science. And they are excited: To scientists, embryonic stem cells, which are harvested from very young human embryos, hold the promise of treating many human afflictions. Because such stem cells are in an "undifferentiated" state, they have the capacity to grow into many types of cells in the body -- muscle cells, brain cells, bone cells, heart cells, pancreas cells. Scientists imagine a future in which such cells could be grown in the lab and then implanted into patients, a procedure that they believe could treat Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, muscular dystrophy, cystic fibrosis, diabetes and perhaps dozens of other diseases.
"Right now, we can envision vast new ways of curing disease," says Michael West, a biologist who is the CEO of Advanced Cell Technology, a private biotech firm working on human cloning and embryonic stem cells. "When we talk about this in public, what this causes is an immense number of parents to write us saying, 'Can you help my child?' That's why we're always saying we should do this. We're 10 years from being able to help people -- but if we're 10 years away, that means we're only a few years from starting the trials."
But because the cells that currently receive federal funding are likely unsuitable for clinical therapies, it's difficult for scientists to conceive of such trials ever beginning under this president. And that's the real problem with Bush's stance. What's wrong with Bush's stem cell policy is not that he has stacked his council. The council is in fact in many ways irrelevant, because Bush, examining his soul, made his decision on stem cells a long time ago. Now the rest of us have to live with it.
