Science

Bush's Stem Cell Policy Started With <cite>Brave New World</cite>

On August 9, 2001, President Bush announced one of the most controversial science policies in history: federal money would be denied to research conducted on embryonic stem cell lines that hadn’t already been developed. Some say Bush’s policy is tantamount to murder. Others laud it as a defense of life against soulless scientific exploitation. Either […]

Bravenewworld
On August 9, 2001, President Bush announced one of the most controversial science policies in history: federal money would be denied to research conducted on embryonic stem cell lines that hadn't already been developed.

Some say Bush's policy is tantamount to murder. Others laud it as a defense of life against soulless scientific exploitation. Either way, according to an article by Bush stem cell adviser Jay Lefkowitz, the President's hand was guided by Aldous Huxley's dystopian classic, Brave New World.

Now, for those of you who haven't paid attention, a quick bit of background: embryonic stem cells -- or ESCs -- have the power to become most any other cell in the body. Scientists think ESCs could be used to rejuvenate damaged bodies and treat diseases that currently defy the power of medicine.

However, there's only one source for ESCs: embryos. (A new technique, called de-differentiation, may very well provide another, but it's still too early to say.) Harvesting ESCs destroys embryos. If you consider embryos to be fully human, this is killing; if not, then denying funds for potentially lifesaving ESC research could be seen as equally immoral.

Out of this tension emerged a bitter culture war front, claims and counterclaims and competing promises about the medical utility of various stem cell types, and a whole lot of hoo-ah. We've covered this exhaustively on Wired Science, and we come down firmly on the pro-ESC research side. But today, that's not relevant.

What is relevant is this passage from Lefkowitz's article in January's Commentary Magazine:

[...] Another suggested that federal funding might have the unintended consequence of creating financial incentives that would encourage the creation of frozen embryos in order to destroy them.

A few days later, I brought into the Oval Office my copy of Brave New
World, Aldous Huxley’s 1932 anti-utopian novel, and as I read passages aloud imagining a future in which humans would be bred in hatcheries, a chill came over the room.

“We’re tinkering with the boundaries of life here,” Bush said when I finished. “We’re on the edge of a cliff. And if we take a step off the cliff, there’s no going back. Perhaps we should only take one step at a time.”

Say what?

The one enduring, truly bipartisan criticism of Bush's stem cell policy is that it's schizophrenic. If destroying embryos after an arbitrary date is wrong, it's also wrong before that date. If funding research on
ESCs derived after August 9, 2001 is wrong, so is funding research on
ESCs derived before August 9, 2001. Arguing that we might as well make the best of damage already done makes no sense if you believe ends don't justify means.

So it's appropriate that Bush, the author of this nonsensical policy, was influenced by Brave New World, precisely because this influence appears so superficially considered. Is Bush a vocal critic of other reproductive technologies, such as picking embryos to match prospective parents'
tastes in gender or ability, that resonate with Huxley's dystopia? No.
And let's not even talk about the social relationships critiqued by
Brave New World. These are just as chilling as its biological speculations, but don't seem to have aroused much political introspection in Bush.

Indeed, for Bush to have taken a message from Brave New World, he would have had to ... cherry-pick it. Imagine that.

Stem Cells and the President—An Inside Account [Commentary]
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