Only the Facts Do

The New York Pravda has the anguished question on the front page of its Week in Rview section today:

Does Science Trump All?

It was a White House photo-op with a stern message: President Bush, surrounded by a passel of babies, warned last Tuesday against a Congressional bill that would increase federal spending on embryonic stem cell research. The legislation, which had threatened to veto, "would take us across a critical ethical line," he said.

Yet in some ways the president - and Congress, for that matter - had been upstaged only four days before. That's when South Korean biomedical researchers reported that they had developed an efficient method for obtaining human stem cells from embryos produced through cloning. Researchers hailed the work as a major breakthrough, one that eventually could make it simpler to get stem cells to study and potentially treat disorders, like Parkinson's and Alzheimer's disease.

The announcement also made plain for researchers an age-old truism: that the march of science and technology cannot be stopped. Slowed, maybe. Modified, probably. But halted completely? No way.

Yet President Bush and religious conservatives have staked much on the idea that they can stop cloning, even when it is undertaken for therapeutic purposes, as is the case with the Korean research.

And there's some evidence to suggest that they aren't just dreaming. While the history of science, and medicine in particular, is full of good ideas that met with opposition that was eventually overcome, there are other episodes where the opposition won out - often because those ideas were not good ones.

There has been much unsuccessful opposition to medical breakthroughs that are now almost universally recognized as beneficial, like vaccination, dissection and organ transplantation.

Blood transfusions, animal implants and in-vitro fertilization itself have all been met with religious objections. Most have been overcome. But there has been successful opposition to some boneheaded concepts like eugenics. Other bad ideas - the Tuskegee syphilis experiments and the vivisection of animals come to mind - have led to the overhaul of research practices and the development and refinement of ethical guidelines.

The debate over therapeutic cloning reflects this mixed history. For some people the research represents a treasure chest of potential therapies; for others it is a Pandora's box, the beginning of a slide toward a dystopian future where life is devalued...

Once again demonstrating their recent penchant for setting up straw men in their arguments and editorials.

Science is the study of the natural world using reason as a tool of analysis.

The philosphical basis behind rational science is to ask a question about the basis of a observable natural occurence. The next step is to come up for an explanation of the phenomenon and to test the explanation. The results are used to affirm the explanation, readjust the explanation, and search for new ways to test the hypothesis.

Eugenics wasn't and isn't science any more than John Bolton's rearranging and reinvention of the data on weapons of mass destruction in Iraq was military intelligence.

Both are attempts to apply and selectively re-interpret facts to serve a political agenda.

Science doesn't trump all.

But sometimes, whether its eugenics in the hands of Nazis, or Lamarkian genetics in the hands of the Soviets, or "intelligence" in the hands of the NeoCons, misrepresentations confront real facts.

Usually with disasterous results for the people that manipulate the data to try to serve their own needs.