Hi X,
This editorial from today's Times should warm your heart as a pro-choice person. Unfortunately, it may help this nitwit stay in office for four more years....
August 18, 2001
JOURNAL
The Genius of George W. Bush
By FRANK RICH
After months of deriding the president
as an idiot, Democrats have to face
the fact that he is at the very least an idiot
savant — and just possibly a genius.
The final proof is The Great Stem Cell Compromise. "This is way beyond
politics," said George W. Bush while pondering his verdict. What's more, he
told the nation, he had found a solution to please everyone. His plan will at
once "lead to breakthrough therapies and cures" and do so "without crossing
a fundamental moral line."
In fact, everything Mr. Bush said is false. His decision was completely about
politics. It will slow the progress to breakthrough therapies and cures. It did
force the pro-life movement he ostensibly endorses to cross a fundamental
moral line. And yet the politics were so brilliantly handled — and exquisitely
timed, for the August dog days — that few vacationing Americans bothered
to examine the fine print, which didn't arrive until the final seconds of an 11-
minute speech. Few have noticed, at least not yet, that the only certain
beneficiary of this compromise is George W. Bush.
Denigrated as a lightweight and a slacker, he seized on the stem cell debate
to transform his image into that of our philosopher king — grappling mightily
with the science and ethics of an issue he and his handlers hyped as "one of
the most profound of our time" — even as he induced religious-right political
leaders to sell out their principles and sent Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and
juvenile diabetes patients to the back of the medical research bus. As an act
of self-serving political Houdinism, this is a feat worthy of Mr. Bush's
predecessor, another master at buying time when caught in a political corner
with no apparent way out.
If you spend a week talking to scientists actively involved with stem cells,
which I did, the most enthusiasm you can find for Mr. Bush's compromise is
lukewarm. "It could have been better, it could have been worse," as Sloan
Kettering's Harold Varmus, the former head of the National Institutes of
Health, puts it. Jerome Groopman, a Harvard Medical School professor
who has worked on bone marrow stem cells, calls the president's decision
"unprecedented" in the way "it ignores the fundamental needs and process of
experimental medicine" by "holding research hostage to private companies"
that own many of the 60 stem cell lines that Mr. Bush has approved for
federal study. "No company has the kind of resources that can match the
N.I.H. for the kind of free scientific inquiry that might bear fruit," says Dr.
Groopman. Besides, he adds: "There isn't a soul alive who can testify that
these 60 lines can give us what we need. The success of science depends on
a string of failures, and no one can work at a laboratory bench with his hands
shackled behind him."
"Where are those lines? Are they any good? Are they available?" asks Doug
Melton, a leading stem cell scientist who had a 45-minute meeting with the
president, Karl Rove and other political operatives in July. It's not enough,
Dr. Melton says, "to say there are cells at Singapore at this phone number
and go get them." Since there has been no firsthand scientific investigation of
the quality of these far-flung lines, some of them could prove stale, unstable
or insufficiently varied for research purposes.
But even if by some miracle they're all just what the doctors ordered, Dr.
Melton fears delays of many months for all the lawyering required to sort out
the intellectual property rights of the Bush-blessed cells before their private
owners ("who have now been given a mini- monopoly") will transfer them to
academic researchers. It was only four days after Mr. Bush's speech that the
Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, allied with the pioneering stem cell
scientist James Thomson, sued its biotech partner, the Geron Corporation,
over who controls which commercial rights. Evan Snyder, another prominent
stem cell researcher at Harvard, fears that some owners of Bush-approved
stem cells could restrict their intellectual property as zealously as "Coca-Cola
and its secret formula or a computer company that won't give out the secrets
of its latest chip."
Dr. Snyder also points out that the administration is "scientifically naïve,"
since some of its approved cells may have been extracted by already
outdated mid- 1990's technology. "We can now get stem cell lines that are
more efficacious and heartier," he says. "Would we fight new infections only
with penicillin and sulfa and not the new antibiotics?" He also worries about a
potential brain drain beyond the well-publicized decision by Dr. Roger
Pedersen of the University of California to decamp to Cambridge University
in pursuit of scientific freedom. It's possible that "new intellects and talents
we'd like to see jump into the game" will go into other fields, given the
roadblocks to stem cell work.
As if these barriers to the expeditious pursuit of life-and-death research
weren't enough, the Bush administration has also yet to appoint its new
director of the N.I.H. — the person needed to run all the bureaucratic and
legal gantlets separating researchers from the approved stem cell lines. Will
that appointee have to pass an ideological litmus test, and if so, will there be
a lengthy Senate confirmation fight?
The president's new council on stem cells, headed by the bioethicist Leon
Kass, may add further confusion and delays. No one seems to know its
precise role, including the White House, which has yet to delineate any of its
specific stem cell duties. If the panel's point is to rule on the ethical questions,
didn't the president already do that? If it's to add another layer of guidelines
as to how the research can proceed, "it could add another year to the
process," says Harold Varmus.
Yet if scientists — not to mention patients desperately hoping for stem-cell
therapies — got at best a half-loaf out of the Bush compromise, the
anti-abortion absolutists got snookered.
The pro-life cause (and the Republican platform that parrots it) has staked its
moral rectitude on the belief that life begins at conception. As Douglas
Johnson of the National Right to Life Committee said in July, "We're
opposed to federal funding of research if it kills embryos, whether the killing
took place yesterday or today."
Well, that was yesterday. By the time the president gave his go-ahead for
federal funds to underwrite research on previously killed embryos, the White
House had smartly romanced the National Right to Life Committee to the
point where it declared itself "delighted" with the news. A few spoilsports
who disagreed with this retreat — such as the U.S. Conference of Catholic
Bishops — were drowned out and marginalized by pro-life politicos like
James Dobson of Focus on the Family and Jerry Falwell, who also
enthusiastically endorsed the Bush speech. Pat Robertson went so far as to
dismiss "ethical dilemmas" as secondary to the "practical reality" of a "very
useful science."
Pro-choicers should welcome all these former pro-lifers into the fold. Their
position — that it's O.K. to sacrifice embryos to the greater good of
potentially ending the suffering of living juvenile diabetes and Alzheimer's
patients — is at one with the pro-choice view that in pregnancy embryos
sometimes must be sacrificed for the health of the mother.
What gives the scientists I spoke with some guarded hope despite the
strictures placed on their work by the president's policy is that Mr. Bush
moved just enough to convince them that the policy isn't permanent. Though
Mr. Bush said he wouldn't change his mind, they predict that if the 60 stem
cell lines aren't accessible or scientifically useful, the political pressure from
patients' advocacy groups and Congress will force inevitable concessions
from the White House. And now they have the added boon that not just
pro-life senators like Orrin Hatch and Bill Frist but also the nation's loudest
pro-life leaders will be in the president's pocket when he next capitulates.
Thanks to the sudden national fixation on stem cells, the entire country now
knows that there are between 100,000 and 200,000 frozen embryos
currently in storage at fertilization clinics, most of them slated to be killed
anyway, most of them with greater potential for saving lives than becoming
lives. As Christopher Reeve has noted, long before anyone had heard of
stem cells there was never any "outrage that these unwanted fertilized
embryos are being thrown in the garbage." When Mr. Bush inevitably finds
another ingenious "compromise" to make more of them available to medical
research, there won't be outrage either — only votes. |
