The Debate

I watched part of the Bush-Kerry debate last night during dinner. I had some restriction digests going on in the lab, and I had about an hour to cook and eat. My housemate upstairs had brought her TV down a couple of months ago, so I finally had the luxury of TV-watching at mealtimes.

It made me so mad.

That thing about stem cell research and abortion. When Bush could think of nothing else to say except repeating that human embryonic stem cell research required destroying life, I realized what sort of monsters we scientists are viewed as. By supporting human embryonic cell research, I am actually supporting the destruction of innocent lives! When I discussed this with my Irish colleague, her first reaction was, "what about sending troops off to get killed? Is that destruction of lives?"

But of course that is a different issue. Let's go back to stem cell research and abortion.

One truth about science is this, you cannot stop its development. Science and technology can be dangerous, but if you choose stop doing research because of the possible danger, you are giving up control of those tools. The US can make up laws to prohibit federal funding to go into human embryonic stem cell research and delay the science by, say, 20 years. That would not stop scientists in other countries or with other funding sources to explore the territory. Eventually, someone somewhere is going to come up with powerful and dangerous therapeutic tools from such research, and, I, for one, would much prefer that tool to be controlled by the US. Because regardless of its shortcomings, most of us foreigners in this country trust the US government more than any other government in the world to handle crises.

As to the ethical advantage of using adult stem cells over embryonic stem cells...... I could not make a fair comment. I recently attended a meeting in which new advances in stem cell research were presented. There appeared to be tremendous advances in the adult stem cell research; people were able to manipulate stem cells isolated from hair follicles into different tissues. All of this appeared promising enough, but does that mean practical therapies are on the way? As a scientist, I know that most of the things you try at the bench would not work. If one looks at the number of the drugs that showed promise versus the number of drugs that made it through clinical trials, you would see the same trend. Most of the things would not work; therefore, if you want to scientist to find a therapy to a disease fast, you have to let them have the tools. Tools including those frozen embryos in the fertility clinics that nobody wanted anyway. If we actually wanted to get into how this really offends some people for religious reasons, can I also mention that steakhouses probably offends some buddhists too? Are we going to ban steakhouses?

I have more to say about abortions; maybe next time.