Our political debates about stem cell research in recent years have stood in a peculiar relation to public opinion. Rather than seek to marshal public sentiment, or even quite build public support, all sides have wanted to claim a preexisting bedrock of widely shared attitudes backing their favored policy outcome. “By the latest poll,” Senator Dianne Feinstein (D.-Cal.) told her colleagues on the Senate floor in 2006, “72 percent of Americans support stem cell research.”
Her colleague Senator Sam Brownback (R.-Kans.), meanwhile, argued in the same debate that a large majority of Americans oppose all human cloning. The Coalition for the Advancement of Medical Research argues that seven in ten Americans want to eliminate restrictions on public funding of embryonic stem cell research, while the Conference of Catholic Bishops points to a poll showing six in ten oppose such funding altogether.
In all of these scenarios, the American public is taken to be moved by clear and strong opinions on the vexed questions of stem cell research, human cloning, and related practices just past the horizon. But attempts to actually study these views, and to pin down the meaning of the large majorities cited by the various parties to the political arguments, have been vanishingly rare.
New Atlantis, Spring 2008
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Mr. Benson states it correctly that the embryonic stem cell debate remains polarized. Political agendas have enabled misinformed public to cling to political ideologies instead of understanding the actual scientific and bioethical issues that will impact our culture and society, both positively and negatively, as embryonic stem cell technologies advance.
As a scientist who has worked on embryonic stem cell technologies, I have become surprised and appalled at how the scientific community has used their political machinery to push these technologies forward without providing the public a realistic bioethical analysis. Not only that, I have heard some top level scientists using words advocating the application of eugenics with such technologies.
In the past, I have ignored the religious right because of their seemingly inflexible stand regarding embryonic stem cell science. But now, the behavior of the scientific community who no longer represents the public as a whole and who also has garnered their political agenda to obtain funding at any expense, has brought me to look upon its opposition as not fanatical, but as a much needed counter-balance.
The public remains ignorant of the cultural, societal and health implications from “stem cell research, human cloning and related practices”. Public opinion is driven by those with special interests instead of scientific and bioethical implications and analysis. Until bioethicists begin proper studies as Mr. Benson suggests, it will, unfortunately, remain that way.
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