Soccer Dad

Hard cell

In 2006 one of the most potent (cynical) campaign weapons in the hands of Democrats was the issue of embryonic stem cell research. Most notably, actor Michael J. Fox entered the fray claiming that such research was his best hope.

The symptoms of Parkinson's disease that all but ended Michael J. Fox's acting career are making him a powerfully vulnerable campaign pitchman for five Democrats who support stem cell research.

In 30-second TV ads for Rep. Benjamin L. Cardin, who is running for the Senate in Maryland, Senate candidate Claire McCaskill in Missouri and Wisconsin Gov. Jim Doyle, Fox shakes and rocks as he directly addresses the camera, making no effort to hide the effects of his disease.

In the McCaskill ad, which has been viewed by more than 1 million people on YouTube.com, Fox tells voters, "What you do in Missouri matters to millions of Americans. Americans like me."

All three candidate won running, in part, on the idea that they were enlightened enough - unlike their opponents - to approve government funding for embryonic stem cell research that was so promising.

But as Charles Krauthammer noted two years earlier when Vice Presidential candidate tried to make it an issue, the issue was misrepresented.

George Bush is the first president to approve federal funding for stem cell research. There are 22 lines of stem cells now available, up from one just two years ago. As Leon Kass, head of the President's Council on Bioethics, has written, there are 3,500 shipments of stem cells waiting for anybody who wants them.

Edwards and Kerry constantly talk of a Bush "ban" on stem cell research. This is false. There is no ban. You want to study stem cells? You get them from the companies that have the cells and apply to the National Institutes of Health for the federal funding.

As Krauthammer wrote earlier this year there was no ban, there was only a limit. One that he approved of with some reservations.

When President Bush announced in August 2001 his restrictive funding decision for federal embryonic stem cell research, he was widely attacked for an unwarranted intrusion of religion into scientific research. His solicitousness for a 200-cell organism -- the early embryo that Bush declared should not be destroyed to produce a harvest of stem cells -- was roundly denounced as reactionary and anti-scientific. And cruel to boot. It was preventing a cure for thousands of people with hopeless and terrible diseases, from diabetes to spinal cord injury.

At the end of his article Krauthammer observed

The House voted yesterday to erase Bush's line. But future generations may nonetheless thank Bush for standing athwart history, if only for a few years. It gave technology enough time to catch up and rescue us from the moral dilemmas of embryonic destruction. It has just been demonstrated that stem cells with enormous potential can be harvested from amniotic fluid.

This is a revolutionary finding. Amniotic fluid surrounds the baby in the womb during pregnancy. It is routinely drawn out by needle in amniocentesis. The procedure carries little risk and is done for legitimate medical purposes that have nothing to do with stem cells. If it nonetheless yields a harvest of stem cells, we have just stumbled upon an endless supply.

And not just endless, but uncontroversial. No embryos are destroyed. The cells are just floating there, as if waiting for science to discover them.

Even better, amniotic fluid might prove to yield an ideal stem cell -- not as primitive as embryonic stem cells and therefore less likely to grow uncontrollably into tumors, but also not as developed as adult stem cells and therefore with more "pluripotential" in the kinds of tissues it can produce.

Now there's been another advance in stem cell research, that apparently obviates the need for using embryonic stem cells. In "Stem Cell Vindication" (or here) he praises the President for standing firm.

Bush got it right. Not because he necessarily drew the line in the right place. I have long argued that a better line might have been drawn -- between using doomed and discarded fertility-clinic embryos created originally for reproduction (permitted) and using embryos created solely to be disassembled for their parts, as in research cloning (prohibited). But what Bush got right was to insist, in the face of enormous popular and scientific opposition, on drawing a line at all, on requiring that scientific imperative be balanced by moral considerations.

This leads Krauthammer to praise the President additionally

Because the moral disquiet that James Thomson always felt -- and that George Bush forced the country to confront -- helped lead him and others to find some ethically neutral way to produce stem cells. Providence then saw to it that the technique be so elegant and beautiful that scientific reasons alone will now incline even the most willful researchers to leave the human embryo alone.

It wasn't just that the President's line slowed progress, but it also spurred progress that wasn't morally objectionable.

It's interesting that as President Bush's term in office is winding down that he's starting to see some successes pay off. In his previous two columns, Krauthammer observed that the United States was turning things around in Iraq and in relations with the rest of the world.

At a time when the Republicans are getting knocked around politically it will be interesting to see if the president can sustain his policy successes and help his party translate them into some surprising victories next year.

stem cells.