WE CAN AT LEAST STOP IT HERE:

Does Science Trump All? (HENRY FOUNTAIN, 5/29/05, NY Times)

In the case of stem cells, some concerns are overshadowed by the tantalizing promise of the research: rejection-free organ transplants, regenerated spinal cords, perfectly matched blood transfusions, cures for diabetes and Alzheimer's.

But those promises run headlong into questions raised by a dark history of research. Take eugenics. According to Christine Rosen, a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington and the author of "Preaching Eugenics," scientists who supported eugenics claimed that it could cure disease and end poverty - involuntary sterilizations were one result.

But the scientific underpinnings cited by early eugenics researchers were often wrong, Ms. Rosen said. "The heritability of certain diseases and eye colors were right, but broader claims they made as a result were incorrect," she said.

Many religious groups tried to stop eugenics, Ms. Rosen said, but they were called obstructionists.

"The only thing that stopped this," Ms. Rosen said, "was war and the lessons of Nazi Germany and improvements in science."

The controversy over eugenics is particularly relevant to the current debate, argues Wesley J. Smith, an opponent of therapeutic cloning at the Discovery Institute, a conservative research group in Seattle.

When eugenics was popular, he said, "people at the top levels of society were accepting of the idea that you could improve the human race by improving the gene pool." Even the United States Supreme Court, he said, supported involuntary sterilization, in the 1927 case Buck v. Bell.

To Mr. Smith and others, the march of science toward therapeutic cloning can be stopped. Indeed, cloning may be halted by its own deficiencies, Mr. Smith said. Cloned animals have developed health problems, and there is a potential for tumors in cloned tissue. And research using non-cloned, adult stem cells, which are drawn from bone marrow and blood, "will not have the moral baggage of cloning," he said.

But Dr. Lee M. Silver, a geneticist who is a professor of molecular biology at Princeton, said that therapeutic cloning could not be stopped because the world has changed.

"The difference today is that we're a global village," he said. "Thirty or 40 years ago, Asia had no scientific prominence whatsoever. Now Asia is a real player in the world."

It was a global village then too--after all, the Germans just adopted eugenics, euthanasia and the like from us. And, just as they went ahead with the experiment after the religious stopped it here, so too may Asia follow a mostrous path that we've wisely stepped off of.

Posted by Orrin Judd at May 31, 2005 6:24 AM