How Bush Terminated Stem Cell Research in America
by Adam Reed
(Author's note: I've been asked for the text of my letter that was excerpted in Robert Tracinski's TIA. He did the selection, which is his intellectual property, so here is my letter as a whole, more or less as sent.)
You note the Democratic convention's focus on additional US funds for stem-cell research. But the Democrats are not the only ones who plan to spend tens of millions of taxpayer dollars on research they favor. US Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson announced recently a $ 19,000,000 initiative, to fund 3 "centers of excellence" to promote the 19 stem cell lines that existed back on August 9, 2001 - when President Bush prohibited the use of subsequently developed stem cell lines in US-funded research. Most of those 19 pre-2001 stem cell lines cannot be used for human therapy at all. The rest have only the most marginal applicability to a minuscule fraction of potential therapies.
In the case of abortion, the focus on "government-funded abortion" was a distraction from the objective moral principle: that the government treat abortion like any other application of medical technology to the betterment of human life. Similarly, in the case of medical research using embryonic stem cells, the principle is that only moral agents can have rights - and embryos are not moral agents. The spotlight that both Democrats and Republicans shine on government funding distracts our attention from what the rest of the government is doing. Through the US Food and Drug Administration, the Bush administration recently sent, to companies considering investment in stem-cell research, an indirect message that could be more devastating, in the long run, than Bush's 2001 ban on using new cell lines in taxpayer-funded projects.
The Food and Drug Administration exercises total control over America's nominally private market in drugs and therapeutic systems. Americans acquiesce in FDA controls because the application of those controls is supposed to be based, not on arbitrary and capricious exercise of political power by appointed officials, but on scientific evidence of the facts of reality, provided by the FDA's own scientists and by outside scientists serving on the FDA's advisory panels.
On May 8, 2001, Steven Galson, acting director of the FDA's Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, decided to prohibit over-the-counter sale of emergency contraceptive Plan B. He made this decision against all scientific evidence evaluated the the FDA's own scientific staff, and against the nearly unanimous (23-4) vote of the expert advisory panel of outside scientists appointed by the agency. Galson's official rationalization of this arbitrary decision set a new record in salacious dishonesty: it was motivated, he said, by lack of information about "the younger age group between 11 and 14, where we know there is a substantial amount of sexual activity" - even though no one in America is allowed to ask young people between 11 and 14 for this information. Yet the Bush administration insists on having Steven Galson's decision, capricious, salacious, dishonest and contrary to evidence though it was, enforced - as a warning, to any enterprise that would invest in therapies contrary to this administration's false morality: if you develop products that the Bush administration disapproves of, you will not be allowed to sell them. This amounts to a de-facto ban on private industry investment in disapproved stem-cell research. A prohibition that the industry, dependent as it is on the FDA's permission to sell its products, will not permit its scientists to challenge. With the exception of a few tiny efforts by the surviving remnants of non-profit institutions without federal funding, stem-cell therapy research has been terminated in America.
Stem cell based organ repair is the only therapeutic technology with a realistic prospect of success against death from organ system failure. US National Center for Health Statistics counted in 2001 - the most recent year for which complete data are available - 700,142 deaths from heart disease, 123,013 from chronic lower respiratory diseases, 71,372 from diabetes, 53,852 from Alzheimer's disease, and 39,480 from kidney diseases. Conservatively estimating that only one-third of those deaths will become preventable with the application of stem cell based therapies, every year of government-imposed delay in the development of those therapies kills 329,000 Americans.
A few foreign efforts in stem-cell therapy research continue, but the loss of American research to date means at least two years' delay. That's about 658,000 sick Americans who could have lived but will die, with the Christianist agenda of their own government as root cause.
At 58, I will have about 40-50 more years to live if stem-cell research resumes - and only about 20 if it remains effectively prohibited. With both Republicans and Democrats in a spending frenzy, the rest of my life is likely to be poor. But if the Democrats were to be elected, and mandate decisions based on objective science at the FDA, and spend my money on research into human health instead of the Republicans' Christianist agenda, then at least, while poor, my remaining life will be reasonably long.
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