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medpundit |
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Friday, April 19, 2002"The 40 Nobelists, including a few economists, expressed their fears this way: "By declaring scientifically valuable biomedical research illegal, Senator Brownback's legislation, if it becomes law, would have a chilling effect on all scientific research in the United States" and would "send a strong signal to the next generation of researchers that unfettered and responsible scientific investigation is not welcome in the United States." Who said scientists no longer believe in absolutes? William F. Buckley Jr. once famously wrote that he'd rather be governed by the first 100 names in the Boston phone book than by the Harvard faculty. All things considered, I'd rather have the cloning issue decided, just now, by the first 100 names in the U.S. Senate than all the Nobel laureates in America." I'd even settle for the first 100 names in the Boston phone book. Nobel prize winners are notorious for going dotty after they've won their prizes. Does anyone remember Linus Pauling and Vitamin C? Henninger goes on to make an even better point: "Last week President Bush gave a speech supporting a ban in which he worried about a time when "human beings are grown for spare body parts and children are engineered to custom specifications, and that's not acceptable." In more than a few circles today this is read as almost up-from-the-swamp fundamentalism. One major editorial summed up the postmodernist's dismissal in four words: "The President's Narrow Morality." This is self-assured moral trumping, and any veteran of the policy wars is by now used to how this the game is played. It's been fun, sometimes. But on this one subject--what it will mean to manipulate the basis for human life or to "discard" human embryos--winning by characterizing the opposition as narrow moral bumpkins just isn't going to be good enough. Simply asserting that your opponents don't care about mitigating disease with technology isn't good enough. The cloning issue will remain a political and intellectual mess unless its proponents engage the other side and just this once make a more philosophically rigorous case for opening this door and stepping through." Exactly. posted by Sydney on 4/19/2002 08:28:00 PM 0 comments 0 Comments: |
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