Fellow Sber Shelley Dpicks up on a discussion of billionaires stepping up to fund basic research originally from Forbes. The most unfortunate passage reads:
(Dr.) 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.
As I've discussed before, the arbitrary restriction of federal funding to a small number of largely useless lines has wasted a ton of money and tremendous amounts of time. I wonder if the objective wasn't even more insidious, through.
The Bush administration has never hidden that it favors privatizing as much as possible. Forcing cutting research on stem cells out in search of private donors could well be a first step in privatizing the NIH and NSF. The sort of basic research that the federal government funds has always been deemed necessary because industry and private sponsors couldn't be counted upon to make the heavy investment involved.
If researchers can be shown to succeed in science without federal funds, it will give anti-science Republicans another reason to cut federal funding for science, or to impose arbitrary restrictions on what research is conducted. What had been a non-partisan and independent process could more easily be turned into another battlefield for the culture war. Why fund research into evolutionary biology?, someone will probably step up to cover the gap. Same for climate change.
Forbes lists a half dozen rich folks who have helped fund research into stem cells. If they can grow that number large enough, they can essentially abdicate responsibility for funding science, just as they are trying to do by backing faith-based initiatives and privatizing Social Security.
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Josh - On what grounds does a liberal-minded person justify using tax dollars to support research which a sizable fraction of the citizenry believes to be immoral? Among traditional liberals, this would be thought to require a demonstration that society will suffer irreparable harm unless the moral scruples of dissenters are overriden. Have you seen such a demonstration? If so, please enlighten your liberal readers.
I would ask you on what basis a classically liberal person would impose some people's moral qualms on other people who don't share those qualms? What irreparable harm does allowing this research to proceed cause?
On the other hand, the harm caused by blocking it is obvious. Money wasted creating duplicate labs for different sets of cells. Lives lost waiting for results of research that is blocked.
It would be one thing if people who opposed the research were compelled to conduct it or take part in its practice. But they aren't. And if you're to argue that funding the government (which funds the research) is sufficient to demand inaction because of moral dissent, what about people who find war immoral? Shall we disband the DoD now? What about the larger group of people who consider nuclear weapons immoral? Shall we unilaterally disarm now?
As I indicated, I'm viewing this from the perspective of traditional liberalism. In that tradition, a distinction is drawn between not assisting in a project and preventing others from pursuing that project. Not requiring dissenters to support ESCR is not equivalent to imposing their views on others. The ethico-political principles at stake here are much more nuanced than your arguments.
I know you say you're viewing this from a classically liberal angle, but it isn't clear how that's true.
Some support stem cell research, others don't. Fine, you're entitled to swing your fist. A classical liberal says that you shouldn't compel people to use treatments developed from that research, nor to conduct it. Again, fine, your right to swing a fist ends at my nose. Classical liberalism also says that, barring some showing of harm, some people's unhappiness shouldn't block people who want to do that research or use those treatments from doing so. Blocking that research violates classical liberalism, it connects fist to nose.
By your argument, the government is being illiberal by funding stem cell research, nuclear weapons research, and animal testing. I think that blocking those and other avenues of research puts people at risk, and that for some people to impose their beliefs on others in that way is classically illiberal, and undermines the principles this nation was founded on. It's the fist connecting with the nose.
Josh -
First, don't assume that I don't support ESCR. I do. But that's irrelevant to the point I've made. Also, images of my fist approaching your nose are unnecessarily inflamatory. Agreed?
You refer once again to _blocking_ research. How does not contributing to ESCR become blocking that research? Those who think ESCR represents a valuable research program are free to act in concert with like-minded people to organize and finance whatever research they think is deserving. The notion that their efforts are being blocked or inhibited by non-contributers is confused.
Although I defend the freedom of conscience of those who have moral objections to ESCR, and so would seek to exempt them from contributing material support to that research, I equally oppose the efforts by some of some of those dissenters to prohibit the pursuit of ESCR by others (a prohibition would constitute a block). Here again, I think I'm squarely in the liberal tradition, defending freedom of inquiry unless it can be demonstrated that that inquiry imposes harms on others.
The fist/nose thing goes back to Oliver Wendell Holmes. Take it up with him.
The restrictions on funding and use of federally funded equipment amount to blocking research. The restrictions in place actively interfere with ongoing research, and interfere with various people's rights, not least the people in need of treatments.
And this argument is precisely what I was worrying about above. The only "right" to NIH funding is a socially enforced one, that the NIH ought to fund any generally accepted scientific path so long as it has a good shot at success. Hell, they fund research into alternative medicine.
But is that a right, or just largesse? I'd say it's become a right, and that the arbitrary restrictions on funding violate that right, or that social contract. And it sets a bad stage.
The way you're using terms, it seems a lot of things would "amount to blocking research," since restricted funds are the norm in research. When words become too flexible they cease to do serious work.
Also, I'm less certain than you that our social contract includes a clause mandating funding for "any generally accepted scientific path so long as it has a good shot at success." But at least I see where you're coming from.