News for March 10
March 10, 2009 by Barbara
Filed under News and Analysis
Cells that Divide
Through executive order, President Obama on Monday lifted the federal funding limits on stem cell research that had been put in place by former President George W. Bush. While some commentators are cheering the news and looking to the research’s potential to change human life for the better –– such as finding cures and treatments to spinal cord injuries and diseases such as Alzheimer’s and diabetes — others are warning about the moral and ethical quagmire that may comes with such research. Be sure to check out the PewForum for a background piece on the issue of stem cell research, the controversies and all the coverage it’s gotten in the media. Other links include:
Informed Comment | “George W. Bush set stem cell research back 8 years and violated the principle of the separation of church and state by issuing what was essentially executive-branch legislation that imposed on a whole country Bush’s religious views. Bush’s move had no principle of popular sovereignty behind it. And likely he didn’t even really believe the doctrines he was imposing on us. We don’t know the full potential of stem cells. Let’s just posit, for instance, that scientists might be able to figure out a way to use them to cure Alzheimer’s. Nancy Reagan was delighted at Obama’s move precisely because she thinks it might, and she saw what the disease did to the former President.”
GetReligion | “I’ll be looking for accuracy in reports on Bush’s funding regime, what stem cell research has accomplished and discussion of other means of obtaining pluripotent stem cells that don’t destroy embryos. This should be a big story line for coming days so hopefully we’ll get some good analysis of how this decision lines up with Obama’s Mexico City revision, appointment of Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius, announcement of his intent to rescind additional health professional conscience protections and other issues of concern to the pro-choice and pro-life communities.”
Articles of Faith | “Lots of reaction is coming in today from religious leaders with a variety of opinions about President Obama’s action lifting the ban on federal funding for embryonic stem cell research. The president referred to religious concerns in his remarks, saying, ‘As a person of faith, I believe we are called to care for each other and work to ease human suffering’.”
Political Animal | “With President Obama’s decision today to reverse Bush-era restrictions on stem-cell research, it was easy to predict some of the conservative complaints. The Family Research Council, for example, said the White House policy will allow “cloning.” The FRC, as is too often the case, isn’t telling the truth.
That, however, is one of the more predictable and routine lies.”Slate | “The danger of seeing the stem-cell war as a contest between science and ideology is that you bury these dilemmas. You forget the moral problem. You start lying to yourself and others about what you’re doing. You invent euphemisms like pre-embryo, pre-conception, and clonote. Your ethical lines begin to slide. … If you don’t want to end up this way—dead to ethics and drifting wherever science takes you—you have to keep the dilemmas alive. You have to remember that conflicting values are at stake.”
Fatal Distraction | The Washington Post
“Death by hyperthermia” is the official designation. When it happens to young children, the facts are often the same: An otherwise loving and attentive parent one day gets busy, or distracted, or upset, or confused by a change in his or her daily routine, and just… forgets a child is in the car. It happens that way somewhere in the United States 15 to 25 times a year, parceled out through the spring, summer and early fall. The season is almost upon us.
- Related link: Failures of Memory, Not Love | Daily Kos
- Related link: Kids in the Back Seat | Political Animal
I Am John Galt | Daily Kos
Ayn Rand and her blinded followers cannot be John Galt because they are not for humanity, they are for themselves. The printing press, the fugue, the cotton gin, the waterwheel, the sonata, the mechanized loom, the steam engine, the induction motor, the Opera, the Hall-Héroult process, the lightbulb, the automobile, the phonograph, the telephone, the radio, the automobile, the Salk vaccine, the transistor, the Apollo V, the cell phone, the iPod. These are my creations. Leonardo Da Vinci, Johann Sebastian Bach, Gottfried Leibniz, Alexander Borodin, Richard Feynman. These are my names. I am anyone who makes something new, so I am everyone. And I need humanity more than humanity needs me because humanity is my canvas and my laboratory, my inspiration and my patron.
- Related link: Altas Raised His Eyebrows | Megan McArdle @The Atlantic
Recession and Class Warfare | Global Comment
People are often encouraged to aim their angst at the poor rather than focusing on the ways in which the system works to impoverish all. Irresponsibility is attacked. Yet I would be remiss if I did not question; where is our rage at the companies that do not pay a living wage or provide proper health care benefits? Not being able to stretch a meagre income to a subsistence level is hardly the responsibility of the individual; it is solely the fault of the commodification of the essential needs in life.
- Related link: Plastic Meltdown | RaceWire
- Related link: Do Lawyers Work Harder Than Movers? | Matthew Yglesias @Think Progress
Is Patriotism a Subconscious Way for Humans to Avoid Disease? | Discover Magazine
Over the past few years, Mark Schaller, a psychologist at the University of British Columbia, has been developing an intriguing theory that behavior can be just as effective as microbiology at warding off disease. According to this theory, we have what Schaller calls a “behavioral immune system.” It’s a way of responding to the outside world, and to the people around us, that is so deeply embedded in our minds that we are hardly aware of it. … The behavioral immune system may also produce an instinctive distrust of strangers. Strangers, after all, may carry diseases against which a person has no immune defense.
Photo: Embyonic stem cells. Photo courtesy of Public Library of Science journal, used under Creative Commons 2.5 license.
Barbara Schwartz is the editorial director at the Xenia Institute. She lives in Oklahoma City, Okla., and currently is pursuing a Master of Divinity degree at Phillips Theological Seminary in Tulsa.
The John Galt article is really nice!
I read The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged in high school and college and always thought that the idea following your bliss in doing creative work that benefited the world was a pretty good thing. And I still do. For all its many many many problems, I always thought that Atlas Shrugged was more damning of crony capitalism than it was of socialism. The socialism that Rand presented in that novel was cartoonish to the point of silliness, so I didn’t even take it seriously.