We know these embryos are going to be destroyed anyway, and we know they aren't protected "persons" under U.S. law and that private and state-funded research will go on, because the U.S. is not a "life begins at conception" theocracy and I dare say never will be.Green’s Bad Advice [Yuval Levin]
Ross Douthat and Matthew Franck have both offered good responses to Ronald Green’s extraordinarily silly op-ed offering the President-Elect some advice about stem cells. Green somehow imagines that the way to diffuse opposition to the destruction of embryos is to do exactly what the opponents oppose, and so he proposes to Obama that he have the NIH “invite” parents whose IVF embryos are frozen to donate those embryos to research so that they could be destroyed for their cells. Green suggests this is some kind of middle ground, but in reality his proposal would actually go further than the two stem cell bills President Bush has vetoed in the past few years, which would have allowed funding for research on cells from embryos donated for research (and so would have created a taxpayer-funded incentive for the destruction of embryos), but would not have had the government actually approach parents who had not decided to give away their embryos for research and invite them to do so. Green’s op-ed is confused and ill-informed from top to bottom, and of course as usual it simply ignores the substance of the ethical dispute surrounding the taking of human life for research—a dispute which, as I argue in my new book on science and politics, is fundamentally about the American commitment to human equality.
The real common ground in this debate is emerging in the increasingly successful efforts to develop cells with the abilities and characteristics of embryonic stem cells but without the need to use or destroy human embryos. But every indication so far certainly suggests that Obama’s approach will be closer to Green’s than to President Bush’s attempts to reach and expand that common ground.
The problem with not allowing federally-funded scientists to work with more than a few stem cell lines is that it stifles the give-and-take with other scientists that's so helpful to progress. The Bush Administration has gone and erected a Berlin-wall-style barrier around the public sector. Federally-funded scientists are having to avoid data garnered from embryos like the plague, lest they lose their grants or be held liable for breaking the law. They cannot use any published findings from the private sector in their work. This really doesn't help anyone, considering that -- as Green points out -- the "life and death decision" had already been made. Green's argument is that the government shouldn't fund the destruction of embryos, but that it should be able to work with those that are already going to be destroyed.
The common ground Levin is looking for -- the use of non-embryonic cells -- would actually be accelerated if public and privately funded scientists were allowed to share data and work together as much as they do in other medical & biological research, uninhibited by the Bush Administration's arbitrary regulation.
I was particularly appalled by the conclusion of Franck's "good response":
Green is bylined as the pro bono chair of the "Ethics Advisory Board of Advanced Cell Technology, a company involved in stem cell research." Here's a question for our ethics advisor: Can he name another moment in American history in which the government proposed that parents offer their children to be killed for the pursuit of federally funded scientific research?Setting aside the immediate issue of contention here (the personhood of "child" embryos), Green is not proposing that parents "offer their embryos to be killed". Rather, Green is proposing that embryos which are going to be killed anyway be permissibly used by federally-funded scientists in conjunction with non-federally-funded scientists who are already free to do so.
Franck may not find this difference meaningful, or he may wish to ignore it, but in any case this is not a good response.
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