Dean's World

Matoko-chan deseerves some serious props for her stem-cell related posts over the past few months - and for her, it's deeply personal. As she notes, the argument by the conservatives who are applauding the President's impending veto that the need embryonic stem cell research (ESCR) is rendered moot by adult stem cell lines (ASCR), is bogus. These are complementary technologies, not competitive ones. The administration's dishonest statements to the contrary, adult lines simply do not have the differentiation potential that embryonic lines do - a fact vouched for by 80 Nobel laureates.

Others may ask, why do we need federal funding? Why can't private funding foot the bill? Simply put, because ESCR is the Manhattan Project and the Apollo Project rolled into one. ESCR isn't an overnight panacea; therefore the immense profits are a long way off, far too long a horizon to justify the expense. NASA is why we have independent spaceflight companies like Scaled Composites (SpaceShip One) and Blue Origin today; the original and ongoing government investment is what lowered the risk and created the scientific and personnel infrastructure that we will reap benefits from for the next hundred years, even as NASA itself declines. Even mighty California, a state whose GDP would rank it among the world's wealthiest nations, can't sustain via its stem-cell ballot initiative efforts the kind of investment over the next several decades that is needed for ESCR to bear fruit.

Others attempt to draw an equivalence between ESCR and organ harvesting. Slippery slope, they argue - ignoring the fact that a ban on fetal farming passed the Senate by unanimous vote, is expected to easily pass the House, and will be signed into law with no fanfare by President Bush later this week. Given that ESCR is the exact opposite of fetal farming - wherein eventually future generations grow their own replacement organs from stem cells harvested at birth - the President's veto today makes a black market in harvested organs all the more likely.

Ultimately, today's veto represents a significant repudiation of the idea that we can use technology for moral ends. Saving lives, curing disease - all using non-viable embryos that would have been discarded into the trash and never attained snowflake-baby status - all from the biological equivalent of splitting the atom. The history of American technology has shown that we as a society have used our immense knowledge and advantages for the greater good - that we as a society can be trusted with the keys to Pandora's box. However, the Administration says otherwise; the Singularity will have to wait.

UPDATE: rikurzhen at GNXP critiques Ramesh Ponnuru at NRO thusly:

Ramesh: It is certainly true that if the president's goal were to maximize embryonic stem-cell research, to the exclusion of other concerns, he would adopt a more liberal policy. The director of the National Institutes of Health has said as much, in a statement that pro-funding polemicists have treated as a devastating admission. But it is also true that no researcher has complained that the current policy is impeding him; the complaints have been more along the lines that the policy is keeping people from going into the field.

This implies a serious lack of understanding of how biomedical science is done... it's done by grad students, post docs and assistant profs (i.e. new people). Additionally, ESC research is relatively new and relatively small. Keeping it from growing means keeping it from happening.

Barry Campbell is angry with the President for vetoing funding for more broad-based embryonic stem cell research.

I am of two minds on this.

First off, I favor embryonic stem cell research because I honestly think it's silly to think that a fertilized egg, or a clump of a few dozen or a few hundred cells, is a human being.

That said, I'm also highly skeptical of the exaggerated claims of the miracles this research will offer, and I also respect the right of peole to disagree with me.

I also note that this President was actually the first President to directly authorize any embryonic stem cell research at all. Does he get even a teensy amount of credit for that, especially given that so many people who voted him into office are ardent pro-lifers? Self-righteous people will snort and sneer and call that "playing to his evil right-wing base" but I think more reasonable people can call it "staying reasonably consistent with the positions you laid out when you ran for office in the first place." And that this is exactly the sort of thing that we have elections for.

I thus think getting mad about it is a waste of energy. A more useful purpose for that energy will be in getting future Presidential candidates to change their minds. We'll be having open Democratic and Republican primaries in 2008. Best to try to get involved in that process--preferably sooner than later.

The Derb lays down the smack upon the latest round of Creationist politics at National Review. Now I am a believer in Intelligent Design myself. I just believe that the mechanism of that Design and Creation follows certain rules, for which Science is doing a faantastic job of elucidating. Hey, I'm a scientist too. But all that aside, as Derb does his thing, he observes:

Creationists respond to this by telling us that they can’t get a hearing in the defensive, closed-minded, “invested” world of professional science. Creationist ideas are too revolutionary, they say. The impenetrably reactionary nature of established science is a staple of Creationist talk. They seem not to have noticed that twentieth-century science is a veritable catalog of revolutionary ideas that got accepted, from quantum theory to plate tectonics, from relativity to dark matter, from cosmic expansion to the pathogen theory of ulcers. Creationism has been around far, far longer than the “not yet accepted” phase of any of those theories. Why is the proportion of scientists willing to accept it still stuck below (well below, as best I can estimate) one percent? The only answer you can get from a Creationist involves a conspiracy theory that makes the Protocols of the Elders of Zion look positively rational.

[...]

Creationism has been around in one form or another for well over a century, which is to say, more than 20 times longer than the interval between Max Planck’s first broadcasting of his quantum theory and his election as president of the Deutsche Physikalische Gesellschaft. The fact that Creationism still has no scientific acceptance whatsoever — no presidencies of learned societies, no Nobel Prizes, not a bean, not a dust mote — does not show that the science establishment is hostile to new ideas, it only shows that scientists cannot see that Creationism has anything to offer them.

Derb is alluding to how Max Planck's revolutionary theory of quantum radiation was essentially scientific blasphemy in 1900, yet less than two decades later he was awarded the Nobel prize (and made president of the German Physical Society along the way).

Now, the point above is focused on replying to the claims of conspiracy by the IDers, but it also applies to any upstart theory whose advocates claim that they aren't being given a fair hearing. Note that this is not the same as claiming that scientific orthodoxy is flawed; in fact, the basic assumption of all science is that the present orthodoxy is flawed. But existence of flaws in the conventional wisdom you are trying to upend does not translate to validation for YORU alternative; and crying about being shut out of the process is tantamount to admitting you aren't willing to put your ideas to the test of real rigor.

Scientific history shows us that ideas flourish when true, and are then gleefully replaced when their usefulness ends.

And yes, I do believe that the same standards apply to the SENS issue or HIV-skeptics. SENS is yet young, but HIV-skepticism has been around for quite some time. What new discoveries does the latter have to show for it? And how long will the former chug along with the same lack of results?

Theories must have redictions, results, testable hypotheses. Anyone claiming to be doing true science (and complaining about The Man keeping them down) is ignorant of science's history, and science's method. But then again, being the closest to a true meritocracy we have in teh history of human civlization, the edifice of science and peer review is the highest-profile target.

Hank notes yet another case of gross scientific misconduct this year. This time it's a "researcher" who bilked literally millions of dollars in Federal grant money for obesity research and for menopause research, now admitting to falsifying 17 grant applications and putting false data in no less than 10 different papers.

It's time the general public, not to mention the scientific community, wake up and realize that when government doles out millions of dollars in grants, and allowed researchers who take that grant money to then take out patents for drugs and testing kits and whatnot that are potentially worth millions, even tens of millions of dollars, the conflict of interest is huge. It would not pass the smell test in any book on ethical business practice or good government guidelines.

Furthermore, in recent years a whole lot of research has been done that doesn't get duplicated by other researchers. What that tells you then is that even if it's only a few bad apples--and we really have no emprical way of verifying just how many bad apples there are in the system, now do we?--just one or two major papers with phony data can cause what engineers and computer programmers will recognize as cascade failure.

This has nothing to do with conspiracy theories, or evil mustache-twirling villains. You don't need those things to realize that the way we're conducting a lot of "science" these days is not the way it was done in generations past, and that both the opportunity and the motivating factors for corruption are now very high, in too many many areas of research.

Furthermore, even fairly ethical people can trap themselves into poor thinking habits when money and career and prestige are on the line.

Voters and politicians need to stop saying, "well these scientists are much smarter than me, we can't question them." That lets them bluster too easily. The process for reviewing and awarding government grants through the phony "peer review" process needs to be reworked from the ground up.

(Note that I didn't say peer review itself is phony; what I said was that the peer review in the grant process is phony. And it is. It needs more transparency and more accountability, and as taxpayers and voters we have every right to demand reform.)

Got a note from Kevin Perrott of the Methuselah Foundation this morning:

Hi Dean,

As you once wrote about Aubrey de Grey and his Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senesence", I thought you'd be interested in this latest press release where his most vocal critics were found a little lacking. Hope you enjoy reading it... We really enjoyed writing it.. now we can move on to the next level? Maybe you'd like to cover this story in your blog?

Our Press Release

The Original Story

Cheers

Kevin Perrott

I am completely and unreservedly a supporter of the goals of this project. Aging is a disease, one that should be fought with every tool available just as we would fight cancer or any other horrible disease.