Billionaires for banned scientific research
A lengthy article in Forbes this morning talks about how the ban on federal funding has led to a response from the private sector. Billionaires like Larry Ellison, Bill Gates, Michael Bloomberg, Ray Dolby and Andy Grove have jumped in, funding initiatives to advance embryonic stem cell research.
Some of you may recall President Bush's recent veto — so far the only veto during his two terms — of the lift of the ban on federal funding of ESC research. It angered lots of scientists and science enthusiasts, myself included. But the private industry has begun picking up some of the government's slack, pouring some three times as much money as the feds into ESC research. Bloomberg, a member of the president's party, and mayor of New York City, has promised $100 million by himself.
This is great and all, but the lack of cooperation and coversation that privately-funded scientists can have with their NIH-funded counterparts is both sad and funny at the same time:
Melton landed enough money to start a separate lab, and he works on turning his stem line into insulin-producing cells to study where they go wrong in diabetics. But half his budget goes to redundant lab gear and overhead he wouldn't need if it weren't for the NIH rules against stem-cell funding. His stem-cell colleague at Harvard, M. Wiliam Lensch, uses only private funding from Harvard but worries about getting in trouble if he merely talks to NIH-funded peers in his lab.
At Memorial Sloan-Kettering, stem-cell biologist Lorenz Studer has received money from Project A.L.S. and the Starr and Michael J. Fox charities (Fox, the actor, has Parkinson's). He cautiously puts yellow stickers on every piece of equipment used for banned experiments to inoculate his operation from any NIH contact. His grad students put stickers on wastebaskets to mock the NIH.
I wouldn't say his grad students should be mocking "the NIH," because I'm sure many (most?) in the NIH would like to see the ban on federal ESC funding lifted just as much as their privately-funded counterparts. Instead, the blame and mockery can be laid squarely at the feet of the Bush administration — something I rarely say about anything. This is what happens when a fundamentalist is elected to office and lets his faith rather than his reason rule his decision-making.
I'm waxing political, and perhaps sounding even a little rabid. That's because I think the objections to embryonic stem cell research are absurd and the ban on federal funding is hurting this country in the long run. The Forbes article makes a comparison to the late 1800s objections to using cadavers in the interest of medical science. Nowadays there's not a medical doctor practicing that didn't work on a cadaver while s/he was in school, and objections to their use are laughable. And that's exactly how this "debate" over ESC research will seem to our children 100 years from now.
This Reason piece puts things into perspective. The Bush administration would do well to read it.
Addendum: Good timing, Jack.
[tags]Medicine, abortion, stem cell research, biology, ethics[/tags]
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