Stem Cell Hypocrisy

I cannot be unbiased on stem cells.

I believe they hold tremendous promise to alleviate suffering, extend useful human life spans, give hope and productivity back to millions, and lower health care expenditures. The downside of stem cell technology is that I fear pharmaceutical companies have little incentive to produce a one-time cure when it is so much more profitable to develop drugs that treat the symptoms and leave the underlying chronic condition intact. My fears surround the as yet unknown horrors that people may one day develop with the technology. I believe that the thorny question of human cloning is really not much different from stem cell therapies, and holds the potential for abuse. I also believe that the potential to "upgrade" humans through stem cell technology will bring about many ethical and legal questions in the future.

For now, the days of seeing the impact of a fully matured technology, with well proven techniques lie somewhere in the future. Stem cell research has been equated with abortion, and therefore vilified and suppressed. We lost 8 years of potential progress, which would have been two or three generations of scientific development and advancement in the last 9 years.

The premise by opponents is that embryonic stem cell research kills a human being. The basis of this assertion begins with the belief that a fertilized egg is a human being. I don't happen to agree with this, as I define this as a potential human being. It cannot survive outside of a human host - its mother or surrogate mother. If you looked at embryonic stem cells under a microscope, at this stage, it would not even resemble a human. Countless millions of fertilized eggs occur naturally each month that never implant on a uterine wall. Nature, for whatever reason, just doesn't catch them and turn them into life. They are flushed away, often unknown to the women that would have been their mothers if fate had not worked out as it did. In nature, these occurances are not seen as abhorrent, they are a regular occurance. Who knows how common this is, but you don't see anyone forming action groups around preventing it. These "spontaneous abortions" are not a conscious decision, so the situation is not entirely equal, and not a serious comparison.

An excess of fertilized embryos occurs because when couples use in-vitro fertilization techniques when trying to conceive. Several fertilized eggs are made, some are used to attempt implantation, and the rest are frozen in case the first attempts fail. After a successful implantation is taken to term and produces a baby, the other embryos are not needed. These embryos are not destroyed immediately, but often kept frozen indefinitely. I'm not sure how many are kept in storage like this, but certainly, many of the excess embryos are eventually destroyed. I believe this is the main source of embryonic stem cells, although I had also heard that umbilical cord blood was rich in these stem cells. I assume this is not an often used source, as there would be no controversy to harvest them, but perhaps I am wrong and this source is being denied, too, in a misunderstanding of the situation.

In light of the recently awarded Nobel Prize for the development of the in-vitro fertilization technique, I find myself questioning the entire practice of assisted procreation. There are too many people in the world already, I cannot see why it is necessary to develop techniques to help us make more. Planetary overpopulation threatens people more than any other problem, as it is the root cause to so many other problems. We have no natural check on our population, and if we were a game species, there would be a movement to have a hunting season for us humans with the justification that something has to be done to "thin the herd". Yet instead, we develop an expensive and complicated procedure to produce children that is artificially and unnatural. Nature had created this infertility, perhaps there is a reason for that. Perhaps this is nature's way of "thinning the herd". Even if it is not, these people are genetically incapable of having children. What makes people that use in-vitro fertilation techniques think that their grandchildren will be conceived naturally? Does anyone think of that in their single-minded quest to procreate?

Where is the outrage over assisted procreation? This process creates the excess embryos which will not be brought to term. The irony of the procedure is that the parents are desperately seeking to create life, and in doing so, require that some of the life they create will be destroyed. In light of that fact, fertility treatments should be an outrage to anti-abortion people. If they are going to oppose stem cell research because it kills humans (which will be killed anyway - with no benefit to society), where is their outrage over the excess embryos that will be killed?

What I have a hard time understanding is why greater value is not placed on those already alive. Many of the people opposed to abortion and stem cell research because they see it as abortion are conservatives. In general, conservatives are more pro-war than others in society. They see no problem with sacrificing lives of full grown soldiers in war. They often see no problem with cutting off benefits to adults that they deem as deadbeat or unproductive. They have no problem complaining that unfortunate living adults (and to be fair, children, too) should not be supported by the state with food, shelter, or medical care. They are often callous about the suffering of grown people, perceiving that the got themselves into this mess. Yet an unborn embryo requires a massive effort to preserve. I see this as inconsistent. Either life is precious, and all life is precious, or life is cheap and no life is precious. I realize that the way people think is that the embryos are defenseless and need protectors and the adults could simply straighten their lives out of their own free will and take care of themselves.

I have mixed feelings about in-vitro fertilation techniques. It is an awesome scientific achievement, a technical triumph. However, I also feel it is a misuse of science. Why do we assist people who can't have children? They might be that way because their genes governing their own reproductive viability are not functioning correctly. In nature, this is the ultimate sign that that particular animal should not be allowed to continue - they can't reproduce, so they end right there. If nature were allowed to take its course, faulty reproductive genes would not survive one generation. I tried to determine what the fertility rate of people produced by in-vitro versus the general public, expecting to see a much lower rate. I could not find any serious studies, just quackery without any scientific or statistical support.

Science should be used to solve problems, not create them, and making humans more fertile in an overpopulated world is unnecessary. I realize that the desire to procreate is an emotional subject. It is hard to hear that you cannot conceive a child for those wanting children. In vitro ferilization provides a way to cheat nature out of a verdict you cannot accept, but it also kicks the can down the road for your children to be faced with the same decision. I believe couples that want children and can't naturally conceive their own should adopt. There is no shortage of "unwanted" children needing a good home. Shifting children from the "unwanted" column to the "wanted" column by welcoming them into a new adoptive family is the best solution to the problems. We need to encourage this to make the world move closer to one where all children are wanted.

They just announced the Nobel Prize in Medicine was awarded to Robert Edwards, one of the scientists that developed in-vitro fertilization.

Scientifically, in-vitro would be a useful procedure to keep or bring back endangered or extinct species. Also, the technique could be crucial in colonizing space station colonies or moon/mars bases. It's much cheaper to ship embryos than whole animals. Spin-offs from the technology will no doubt be incorporated into Stem Cell therapies in the future. So while I applaud the scientists for developing the procedure, I believe it is being misused to promote human fertility.

Draining down Science

We need to step up our efforts in science in this country. We had a wake up call once before, when the Russians launched Sputnik. That panicked Americans because until that time we sat back in fortress America, secure in the certainty that we were ahead and invincible. Spuntik taught us that if the Russians could launch a satellite, they could launch ICBMs and wipe us out.

Our panic spurred the space race, drove a generation of students into science and engineering, put men on the moon, and provided us with the boost to keep us ahead in technology for decades.

We stand at a point similar to that right now. This crisis isn't as clear as Sputnik but its implications are just as dire. The problem is that we are divided in our understanding and perception of this crisis. In fact, have a sizable faction of the country that doesn't think there is a crisis.

The main crisis I'm speaking about, of course, is climate change, but that is just a result. The root crisis is energy and our using up resources while polluting our planet. The tragedy is that not only are we not prepared with enough engineers and scientists, but we aren't trying to increase our pool of qualified people or fund the institutions that train them and produce our basic research.

These are not new thoughts to me, but lately, there are some things that have happened that remind me of the horrible position we are in. I love the Mars exploration rovers Spirit and Opportunity. Last month's decision to scale back the Martian Probe program and idle the probes shows a lack of spirit and squanders a golden opportunity. Here is a program that is being cut because it is succeeding far beyond its initial expectations. The probes can't last forever, shouldn't have lasted for as long as they do, and shouldn't be abandoned just because we are short sighted and don't have the will to see this experiment out to the end.

The mounting crisis I fear the most is the degredation science education in schools. It started coming under deliberate and systematic attack because creationists objected to the teaching of evolution in schools. Elections of School Board officials in Kansas were based solely on the desire to turn back science education 140 years and derail progress in rational thought. When parents teach their children that science is attacking their religion and they shouldn't believe in what science tells them, they are no better than the Taliban or Iranian fundamentalists that sought to cram their people's increasingly free minds back into the box of religion inspired ignorance.

Science has also been under attack by Bush Administration, starting with the muzzling of any government scientist that spoke out about climate change and continuing with the restrictions on funding stem cell research.

Our trade agreements have resulted in a steady drain of manufacturing jobs, requiring less trained engineers in industry than in the past. Our software companies cannot find enough qualified programmers to develop the programs we need to function in society (witness the latest Windows launch of Vista, in addition to many other examples of glitchy, slow, and poor performing systems and software).

A recent Journal of Science podcast had an excellent discussion where the speaker talked about the long term benefits of primary research. He mentioned that some of the most important discoveries were originally just novelties and real breakthroughs took years to become developed, put into widespread use, and eventually become essential to life as we know it. The podcast listed railroads (almost 60 years from discovery to widespread use), computers (40 years), lasers (30 years), and transistors (30 years) as inventions that fit this description.

The mysteries we are probing now, such as the nature of Mars and Saturn, the search for dark matter, and understanding subatomic particals are basic fields of research that need to be explored. No one can predict where these searches will take us. The discoveries we are tapping into now have the promise of fueling industry and solving our problems for many years to come. Now is not the time to scrimp on science, now is the time to redouble our efforts.

Post Script: right after posting this, I heard a Scientific American story about the movie Expelled starring Ben Stein. This is a movie touting the merits of Intelligent Design and talking about how Evolution is flawed, but the scientific community is aggressively working to discredit anyone that opposes it. So my posting is timely, and the story goes beyond my premise to show that there are people actively working to discredit science.