A Pox on Stem Cell Research


By DEBORAH BLUM
Published: August 1, 2006
Madison, Wis.

IN vetoing legislation that would have supported medical research using embryonic stem cells, President Bush described his decision as moral rather than scientific, an act of conscience opposed to the taking of the “innocent human life” represented by embryonic stem cells. The potential of using these cells to develop life-saving medical cures, Mr. Bush said, was a temptation to be resisted.

The president’s veto appears to create an intractable problem for stem cell researchers and their advocates. How is the research to advance from hopeful to helpful when national policy inhibits the work from being done? Discouraged proponents have suggested that the president’s decision, which was applauded by conservative religious groups, has the potential to keep American science locked in the past.

The past, however, seems to encourage a more optimistic outlook. Medical progress has stirred religious and moral objections throughout history — objections that were overcome as the benefits of medical advances became overwhelmingly obvious. In the 11th century, European church leaders warned monks that treating illness with medicine showed such a lack of faith in God that it violated holy orders. When 19th-century doctors began using chloroform to alleviate the pain of childbirth, the Scottish Calvinist church declared it a “Satanic invention” intended to frustrate the Lord’s design.

An illuminating case study is the late 18th-century controversy over inoculation against smallpox. Condemned by clerics as both immoral and blasphemous, smallpox inoculation offers some surprising parallels to our current impasse over research using embryonic stem cells.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/01/opinion/...