Below The Beltway

As expected, President Obama today signed an Executive Order lifting the restrictions that President Bush had placed on federally funded embryonic stem cell research:

WASHINGTON — Pledging that his administration will “make scientific decisions based on facts, not ideology,” President Obama on Monday lifted the Bush administration’s strict limits on human embryonic stem cell research.

At a ceremony in the East Room of the White House, before an audience that included lawmakers, scientists and patients, several of them in wheelchairs, Mr. Obama announced that he was issuing an executive order intended to advance the research. He said he hoped Congress would follow with bipartisan legislation that would ease the existing restrictions even more.

The president acknowledged that studying stem cells extracted from human embryos, which are destroyed in the process, is deeply divisive.

“Many thoughtful and decent people are conflicted about, or strongly oppose, this research,” the president said. “I understand their concerns, and we must respect their point of view.”

But Mr. Obama went on to say that the majority of Americans “have come to a consensus that we should pursue this research; that the potential it offers is great, and with proper guidelines and strict oversight the perils can be avoided.”

In making his announcement, Mr. Obama drew a strict line against human cloning, an issue that over the years has become entangled with the debate over human embryonic stem cell research.

He said that he would ensure that his administration “never opens the door” to cloning for human reproduction, adding, “It is dangerous, profoundly wrong and has no place in our society or any society.”

Mr. Obama paired his executive order with another document, a presidential memorandum directing the head of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy to “develop a strategy for restoring scientific integrity to government decision-making.”

From a scientific standpoint, I think this is a good development for many of the same reasons that Jerry Remmers does in this post at The Moderate Voice:

For me it’s a no-brainer.

Diabetes has ravaged my body for a quarter century. Extended research jump started with renewed federal grants holds promise for a cure not only for diabetes but many others such as cancer, Parkinson’s and spinal injuries.

If you are doomed to die from these diseases, it is akin to being tossed overboard and become desperate enough to clutch to any flotation devise to keep you alive.

Or to recall an historical example, during the 1960s and early 70s thousands of Americans went to Mexico to obtain the cancer-fighting drug Laetrile which was banned in the U.S. The drug’s effectiveness was inconclusive.

This is not the case with various forms of stem cell research.

I’m no geneticist nor a moral ethicist. But no matter how hard I try, I fail to comprehend the reasoning behind the basic argument offered by opponents. They have no problem discarding unused days-old embryos obtained from fertility clinics. But they yell “murder” when the embryos to obtain the cells are destroyed for scientific research.

My fervent plea to the president: Leave politics and God out of the discussion and turn it over to scientists at the National Institutes of Health and let them establish the research grant guidelines.

Now, unlike Remmers, I am not presently suffering from a debilitating disease. However, I have had family and loved ones who have been forced to deal with everything from Cancer to Alzheimer’s Disease to Parkinson’s Disease and, quite honestly, if there is any scientific merit to using embroynic stem cells to cure diseases that kill or debilitate millions of people per year, then that avenue should be pursued, not just because the research itself could lead to a cure but because, sometimes, science leads researchers down paths they might not have planned on to things that help millions, like Penicillin.

At the same time, though, I agree with what Kip said back when Bush vetoed a stem cell research bill in 2006:

There should indeed be no federal funding of stem cell research — because there should be no federal funding of any medical research of any kind.

Demand creates its own supply. Where there is a need (i.e., a potential market) for the fruits of such research, private “greedy” capitalists will undertake it. And even where there are potential shortfalls (e.g., rare diseases, orphan drugs), the non-profit sector, relying on charitable support, can pick up the slack.

The government can never catalyze discovery; it can only forcibly misallocate resources away from where people actually want them to be deployed.

And, there is nothing in the Constitution that authorizes these expenditures to begin with.

Notwithstanding this, though, I think Obama did the right thing here. If the government is going to give research grants to scientists, the awarding of those grants should be based on scientific merit, not religious belief.