A Topical Debate: Stem-Cell Research

(with guest-blogger Steve E)

Steve E: I saw the MJ Fox ad on tv this morning, bless his cotton socks.

I have to admit I get pissed off when the biblical morality comes thru with all the right wing yanks I generally agree with, whether it's about stem cells, or Anne Coulter relentlesly pulling in the subject of 'baby murder' (embryocide? zygote-acide?) to every essay unrelated to that subject.

Scott B: I disagree - I think the conservatives are right to oppose gov't funding for fetal stem-cell research.

After 30 years of embryonic stem cell research they've come up with nothing worthwhile, and what therapies they have tried using ESCs had terrible side effects on the patients they were tested on, whereas adult stem cell research, which no one objects to, has already proved hugely fruitful.

Adult stem cell research has provided around 80 cures for diseases like sickle cell anaemia. And there are currently around 1,200 human clinical trials ongoing, looking into the potential for other cures/treatments, whereas embryonic stem cell research has produced zero cures, and ESCs are being used in zero clinical trials. So naturally, private enterprise is happy to fund ASC research to the tune of billions, but sees ESC research as a dead-end. Why should taxpayers have to step in to fund it instead?

Steve E: You read too much right wing bible-bashing Save-the-Fetuses shit! A lot of the stem cell research institutes aren't either marrow stem cell research or embryo stem cell. They're just investigating it. Full stop. The marrow stem cell research didn't come out of the blue. It was pioneered by people who'd started on the embryo shit.

Scott B: If it were true that scientific researching of ESCs leads to advances being made in ASC research, then there's no reason that wouldn't be funded either. There are very few areas of R&D where – so long as you have the slightest bit of evidence that it's a remotely fruitful area of research - you won't get some entrepreneur, or private philanthropic institute, willing to stump up the cash.

Whether embryonic stem cell research has any merit in the long run, no-one has a clue. The point is, at the moment there's no more evidence in favor of putting billions of taxpayers' dollars into this research than there is in wasting billions of taxpayers' dollars by conforming to the Kyoto accords.

Steve E: Yeh, but the objections tend to have a moral basis that precludes the facts over whether it works or not. Even if stem cell research has gone on for 30 years, it's only the last 5 years where they've actually been able to grow other cell types from the cell line. So potentially productive research is still in its infancy.

I agree, the most promising research currently is currently with adult cell lines, but that doesn't mean that foetal research may not eventually bring the best benefits.

Most branches of science where there's either a new movement or a break from the accepted order has many propogandists, but I'd wager most involved are just scientists getting on with their job. It's perhaps essential that such groups have crusaders to keep the area of research alive.

Scott B: Sure, the religious fundamentalists would like to prohibit government funding of fetal stem-cell research because they see it as violating the sanctity of human life, but whether you agree with that or not, this research shouldn't be being subsidized by the government in the first place - there is nothing stopping the researchers obtaining private funding, which they would do easily if they had anything actually worth funding.

Adult stem-cell research is privately funded to the tune of billions because investors are driven by concrete results not self-aggrandizing dogma, unlike the embryonic stem-cell research advocates who see themselves as heroic progressives fighting the forces of reaction (to them it's Gallileo all over again). They're for progress! And the people who want to stop them oppose progress! And they're so wrapped up in this idea of themselves as viruous progressives that they're incapable of honestly appraising the value (or lack of it) of the actual research. Just as global warming zealots are too wrapped up in their sense of virtue in being saviours of the planet to ever examine the empirical evidence objectively.

Steve E: Yeh, what sometimes gets missed in the debate is the fact that private funding has not been banned at all. The problem is with government funding. I sit on the fence with this one, cos governments fund all sorts of science projects that will never benefit the average tax payer. But I like all that stuff.

Scott B: So, Ok, sometimes public money might usefully go to serious scientists who are engaged in some potentially fruitful area of research which market investors haven't yet recognized as such. But if the principle is conceded that it's acceptable to subsidize anything that, although it hasn't produced results yet, MIGHT be beneficial at some point down the line, then this is an inevitable opening for moral crusaders, or handout-seeking opportunists, to put pressure on gov't to fund their supposedly similarly promising research, which MIGHT also produce great things at some unspecified future date (is their any conceivable research project about which something so non-specific couldn't be said?)

And these do-gooder crusaders with their self-righteous causes will always be the ones who seek funding most aggressively (and will also seek ever-greater funding at the tax-payers' expense because their failure to come up with results is never due to their own shortcomings but always to their having been 'underfunded'). The resultant harm always far outweighs the good - because people who are producing genuinely worthwhile things don't need the gov't to finance them, but people who are on a moral mission - but who aren't actually producing anything of worth - have only the option of lobbying the gov't for funding.

Anyway, even if such subsidies didn't have overwhelmingly negative consequences, there would be all the hidden costs to consider, e.g. what about all the R&D that the private sector, with its proven track-record of success, would have undertaken were the money for it not diverted through taxation to subsidized research instead?

Steve E: I've been buying embryonic stem cell active yoghurt culture drinks and I'm feeling better than I have in years. If that's not proof I don't know what is.

Scott B: Ok, you win..