I’m sorry I didn’t see Gilbert Meilaender’s excellent New Atlantis article on embryonic stem cell research before Election Day. Meilaender, a member of the President’s Commission on Bioethics, was one of my professors at Oberlin College in the late 1980s.

As Meilaender argues, the advocates of embyronic stem cell research, such as Ron Reagan, do not merely support the use of discarded embryos that were already destined for destruction. These advocates actually support research using cloned embyros that are created specifically for research purposes.

One need not be a religious zealot to be alarmed by this idea or to think that scientific inquiry should be constrained by moral limits. An excerpt from Meilaender’s thoughtful piece is below.

Another piece in the same issue of the New Atlantis notes that there is currently no ban on stem cell research in the U.S.:

Both [John Kerry and John Edwards] regularly declare in their stump speeches that the Bush administration has “banned” stem cell research, which is flatly false. There are in fact no restrictions at all on stem cell research, whether adult or embryonic, in the United States, making this country the most liberal of all the Western democracies on this subject. Using private funds, researchers can do whatever they wish. Using public funds, they can use a fixed group of embryonic stem cells lines, where the embryos in question had already been destroyed before the president’s policy went into effect. There are, as of this writing, 22 embryonic stem cell lines available for federal funding (an increase of three since the last issue of this quarterly journal, with more on the way), and nearly 500 shipments drawn from these lines have already been made to researchers. The NIH provided about $25 million for embryonic stem cell research last year and spent another $180 million on ethically non-controversial adult stem cell work.

To call this a ban would mean that the government has “banned” anything it does not fully subsidize, which would include almost everything anyone does in America. Far from a ban, there is in fact a total absence of limits on stem cell research, along with fairly substantial public subsidies for the work.

Here is an excerpt from Gil Meilaender’s piece in the New Atlantis:

Moments after Ron Reagan had completed his “nonpartisan” speech recommending (though he did not say so) cloning for purposes of embryonic stem cell research, I was channel surfing on my minimal cable package in search of comment on the speech. For my sins I landed on MSNBC, where Campbell Brown was interviewing (on the convention floor) Rep. Diana DeGette, a Democrat from Colorado.

Rep. DeGette earnestly assured Campbell and the rest of us that what Ron Reagan had recommended was simply using “spare” embryos that had been produced—but, as it turned out, not needed—for in vitro fertilization procedures. These embryos, destined for destruction anyway, were what Ron Reagan had recommended be used to bring about the cures that Rep. DeGette was confident lay in the future if only we forged ahead with research.

Campbell Brown seemed satisfied; at any rate, she raised no questions about Rep. DeGette’s analysis of and response to the speech. I, however, was amazed, and uncertain which would be the more charitable reaction to Rep. DeGette: Should I assume that she was knowledgeable but duplicitous? Or should I assume that her comments were entirely straightforward, even though utterly mistaken? Probably it is more charitable—and closer to the truth—to conclude that Rep. DeGette simply didn’t know what she was talking about.

Rep. DeGette was probably not alone in failing to understand what Ron Reagan was actually recommending; for, he never used the words that embryonic stem cell research advocates now avoid like the plague. What words? “Cloning.” And “embryo.” Yet, the procedure he described (that would, he implied, within another ten years give each of us our “own personal biological repair kit”) was precisely cloning. One takes an ovum, removes its nucleus and replaces it with the nucleus of the person to be cloned. The resulting product is then stimulated in such a way that it begins the cell division that characterizes the earliest stages of embryonic development of a human being—and then, bingo, we get embryonic stem cells. But, of course, we get them because this procedure results in an embryo, which is destroyed in order to procure those cells.

Clearly, Ron Reagan had been getting some coaching. When stem cell research first became a controverted topic, proponents tended to speak of “therapeutic cloning” (as opposed to “reproductive cloning”), trusting that the positive overtones of “therapeutic” would outweigh public distaste for anything called cloning. When this turned out not to be the case, proponents turned instead to sanitized technical language—speaking of somatic cell nuclear transfer to produce stem cells, but not of cloning or of embryos. That Ron Reagan knows this is deceptive was clear from the rest of his speech. After all, were no embryos involved or destroyed in this process, there would have been no need for him to argue that these “cells” “are not, in and of themselves, human beings.” And were it not a cloning procedure that he was describing and recommending, he could not have stated that it would eliminate the risk of tissue rejection.

Opponents of embryonic stem cell research have regularly noted that its advocates slip back and forth between talking of research carried out with “spare” IVF embryos and research using cloned embryos created solely and explicitly for research. The reason is simple: What researchers really want is what Ron Reagan recommended—cloned embryos for research. But, sensing that the public may be more receptive for now to research using “spare” embryos (doomed to destruction in any case, as we are always told), proponents often prefer to start there, all the while deriding “slippery slope” arguments which suggest and predict that we will not in fact stop there. At any rate, it should be clear that anyone who wants to join the cause that Ron Reagan set forth—and who, unlike Rep. DeGette, understands what he was saying—is supporting research using cloned embryos.

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