Update 3/21/09 - Dr. David Prentice and Clarke Forsythe, Wasting Tax Dollars on the Wrong Research Dr. Prentice is one of the foremost experts on stem cell research.
- Update - Charles Krauthammer compares the stem cell addresses of President Bush ("Bush's nationally televised stem cell speech was the most morally serious address on medical ethics ever given by an American president") with that of President Obama ("Obama's address was morally unserious in the extreme. It was populated, as his didactic discourses always are, with a forest of straw men.")
- (Original Post)I am grateful to Yuval Levin for the following post at the National Review Corner:
The surrender
of political authority to scientists evident in Barack Obama’s stem
cell executive order and remarks last Monday seems to have hit a bit of
a nerve. I wrote about the subject in the Washington Post
last week, but over this weekend several voices on Obama’s side of the
stem cell question have made the same point: that whatever your view,
you’ve got to articulate and defend it as a moral, social, and
political matter, not defer to scientists on a non-scientific question.
The Washington Post has an editorial making that case today, and yesterday the Post ran an op-ed from former Harvard stem cell scientist David Shaywitz reminding us of the limits and weaknesses (as well as the great strengths) of the academic scientific enterprise.
Meanwhile, Scott Gottlieb’s Wall Street Journal op-ed highlights a different irony of the stem cell policy: the way in which many of the most forthright champions of embryo research simultaneously favor putting up serious obstacles to private sector medical innovation.
And if you want more on science and politics, there’s this book I could mention too. [Me: Levin is referring, of course, to his Oct. 2008 book, Imagining the Future: Science and Americanm Democracy].