NO DETECTIVE, HE

Bush Pushes Food Tech, Hobbles Health Tech (James P. Pinkerton, May 27, 2003, Newsday)

On the one hand, President George W. Bush is urging the world to embrace the wonders of biotech. On the other hand, Bush is urging Americans to forgo those wonders.

Meanwhile, Democrats are forming an opposition. And so a conflict of visions is emerging, a conflict with implications for the 2004 presidential election - and vast implications for the 21st century.

On Wednesday, Bush launched into a discussion of the "long-term problem of hunger in Africa," declaring the need to apply "the latest developments of science." Indeed, technology has made food more abundant. Yields for American corn growers, for example, have risen from 29 bushels per acre in 1900 to 134 bushels per acre in 1998, according to the University of Minnesota.

But the president had a particular kind of science in mind: Genetically Modified Organisms - a science that could further accelerate U.S. ag exports, which totaled $51 billion last year. As Bush argued, "By widening the use of new high-yield bio-crops ... we can dramatically increase productivity and feed more people across the continent." And yet, he continued, "Our partners in Europe are impeding this effort. They have blocked all new bio-crops because of unfounded, unscientific fears."

Indeed, Europeans are opposed to what they deride as "Frankenfoods." But so are many Americans. The non-engineered "natural foods" industry is a $7.8-billion enterprise in the United States, growing at 22 percent a year, according to ABC News.

Yet while Bush has gone on offense in one biotech sector, he is on the defensive in another sector. On the same day that the president spoke, one of his leading would-be challengers spoke, too. Sen. Joe Lieberman (D-Conn.) unveiled an ambitious approach to health care, focusing more on Big Science than on Big Government. Noting that chronic diseases afflict 100 million Americans, Lieberman proposed a $15-billion-a-year research program. The heart of his pitch was a new Health Advanced Research Projects Agency, deliberately modeled after the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. DARPA, among breakthroughs, established the Internet in the late '60s.

Lieberman aims for similar breakthroughs in health and is willing to reverse federal policy to achieve them. As he said, "On the first day I am privileged to enter the Oval Office, I will rescind the ban on stem cell research." He declared that the current government "ban" on such embryo-based research - really a partial ban, promulgated in August 2001 - is inhibiting research gains on a variety of ills.

The difference between experimenting on human beings as opposed to plants would not seem to be as difficult to comprehend as Mr. Pinkerton makes it, but then he seems confused about a great deal, as Paul Cella points out. Posted by Orrin Judd at June 7, 2003 7:10 AM