It’s been quite a week for federal funding of science. There has been movement on the energy bill, which is critical to also funding fundamental science. The most news-grabbing event of the week was, of course, the second stem cell bill veto by the President in as many years. I commented on the first veto at this same time last year [1] [2]. Actually, looking back on it my first comments were a typical exercise in bad rhetoric, perhaps an attempt to answer the echo of the President’s hollow rhetoric.
Rhetoric aside, the facts on the ground cannot really be disputed. Stem cell research is an exercise in basic research. While the possibilities are exciting, the realities are harsh. Stem cells can be harvested most easily from human embryos, during the “blastocyst” phase of the embryo’s development. We understand very little about how stem cells are signaled to become other kinds of cells, limiting what we can do with them. But, the basic science path is clear: find a variety of ways to cultivate different kinds of stem cells, and find ways to signal them to become specialized cells.
The federal government should be all over this. While stem cells hold promise, the reality is that they are a risky investment for private companies whose shareholders keep them to a quarterly system and expect growth, not long-term investment. The federal government is in a much better position, with its long and penetrating vision for unapplied, basic research. The scientific community clearly stands ready to convert funding into hard labor, spending the typical thankless long hours in the lab testing ideas about the biology, biochemistry and biophysics of stem cells.
However, this is a community yet again forced into a dangerous holding pattern. Like a jet, a science asked to circle too long runs out of fuel, and chokes the pipeline of students, post-docs, professors, and doctors. Without funding, professors cannot get grants, and cannot hire post-docs. They must continue to train students, but the students will get little or no exposure to the frontier of stem cell research unless private money is available. This puts U.S. research in this field behind many other nations, whose governments have fulfilled the pledge to fund such science.
This week, the President put science back into another orbit around the airport. With the stroke of a pen, he vetoed a bi-partisan bill trying to reestablish federal support for new stem cell lines. He said the following of his actions: “Destroying human life in the hopes of saving human life is not ethical . . . [The United States is] a nation founded on the principle that all human life is sacred.” [3] Ironically, I assume the principal on which he bases this statement is the opening of the Declaration of Independence, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” Here, the Declaration mentions only “men”, a theme which resonated through American society until well after women got the right to vote. Even in the modern context of “men” referring to both genders, I am fairly certain that our learned revolutionary forebears would have scoffed at the idea that a clump of cells not much bigger than a cold virus has the same rights, if not more, than those of a middle-aged citizen struggling to cope with a vicious neurological disorder.
I’m being a bit snide here – certainly, I have no more expectation of understanding for the thoughts of the founding fathers than the President, despite his high office. However, there is a much deeper irony in the President’s statement, one often pointed out by pundits and critics. I reiterate it here from a more scientific point of view. To cast moral judgement on certain basic research as “destroying human life in the hopes of saving life”, declaring it “not ethical”, is at best hypocritical from this President, as well as those in Congress who agree with him. Let’s dig a little deeper, relying on the public record to point out why this is such a sickening affair.
The “Department of Defense Appropriations Act, 2007 (Enrolled as Agreed to or Passed by Both House and Senate)”, or HR5631, provides funding for the Department of Defense, which includes all branches of the U.S. military [4]. According to the Senate summary report on their version of the act, which is easier to get totals from, the bill appropriates about $450 billion in spending. $400 billion of this is “to develop, maintain, and equip the military forces of the United States” with the remaining $50 billion allocated “for operations related to the Global War on Terror” [5]. A broad description of the bill from the Senate report explains its purpose: “Functional areas include the pay, allowances, and support of military personnel, operation and maintenance of the forces, procurement of equipment and systems, and research, development, test and evaluation. Appropriations for foreign military assistance, military construction, family housing, nuclear weapons programs, and civil defense are provided in other bills.”
I was interested in the spending on “research, development, test and evaluation”. Let’s take a look at a few interesting items. Looking at the combined R&D, test and evaluation budgets of the branches of the military we find that this fiscal year we are spending $75.8 billion on such programs. Of course, the programs are largely unnamed, so it’s hard to know how much of that is passive defense development – armor, medical response, countermeasures – and how much is active – explosives, advanced weaponry. However, given the long history of the military as an agency whose specialty is expressly the efficient cessation of life, we can assume a lot is spent on active defense.
While you and I may disagree on the purpose of the military – defending freedom, exporting democracy, kicking ass – we should both agree that ultimately the volunteers in the U.S. military are armed and put in difficult moral situations where sometimes saving the life of a comrade means taking the life of an innocent. Certainly, these actions are reviewed, but not every soldier involved in such an action is judged “not ethical”, often with the “fog of war” cited as a reason for the incident. Certainly, we can both agree that war is awful, regardless of the motivation, and while we can accomplish great good we are also paying for the possibility of creating great suffering. Every human is capable of valor and horror, as demonstrated by such famous incidents as the “Stanford Prison Experiment”. In the defense budget, we are paying for brave volunteers to enter the battlefield and make decisions in moral grey areas every day, often taking life to save life. Isn’t, in fact, war essentially that? Isn’t war the act of taking life to protect a greater ideal, a greater number of lives? Do we not hold up war as sacred – the revolution, the civil war, world war II? In doing so, do we not accept that sometimes to save lives, you must take life? That certainly seemed the drum beat heading into Baghdad.
What would we have spent on the stem cell research, through the federal government? Well, the vetoed bill asked for merely the lifting of restrictions placed by the President on new stem cell line research funded by the federal govt. That means that we can’t judge the cost until the ban is lifted, because Congress isn’t allowed to appropriate monies while the ban stands. One can guess that such research would not exceed the research budget of the National Institutes of Health, which is set for FY07 at about $1.1 billion by the last continuing resolution. Stem cells would be a fraction of that – maybe a few million or hundred million. That’s essentially what the President blocked, arguing that taking a life to save a life is not ethical.
Every week, we spend about $1.4 billion – about the same as the total NIH research budget in a year – on national defense R&D, the premise of which is that sometimes it’s more important to take a life or lives in order to save many more. Whether or not you think the war in Iraq is a justified war, you must at least accept the moral premise of war. I must say, I don’t recall the President vetoing the defense bill, judging war “not ethical”. Nope, I just can’t recall him doing that at all.
[1] Vetoing science, upholding science fiction (TAOMPH)
[2] A life is more than this… (TAOMPH)
[3] Bush Vetoes Measure on Stem Cell Research (NY Times)
[4] Department of Defense Appropriations Act, 2007 (Enrolled as Agreed to or Passed by Both House and Senate)
[5] Senate Report 109-292 – DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE APPROPRIATIONS BILL, 2007
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