And Kerry Shall Make The Lame To Walk

During the second presidential debate, Democrat John Kerry said he would have science direct his policy decisions on embryonic stem cell research. That’s demonstrably untrue. But one must wonder where ethics fits into his thinking?
Ethics are not quantifiable. One cannot plug measurements into a mathematical formula and arrive at unambiguous answers. The pursuit of medical knowledge has often steered science afoul of ethics. A number of reprehensible medical experiments, ranging from the Tuskegee experiment on syphilis infected black men to Nazi hypothermia experiments on concentration camp inmates yielded useful medical data. But was the means of the collection worth the cost? On the whole, people of good will decided that it was not.
Science has established ethical standards for doing human research, but this system works best because the final decision is not in the hands of the scientists. By electing to put scientists above ethical considerations, John Kerry has subordinated ethics to expediency, just as Nazi death camp scientists did when they dunked Jews into vats of ice water, seeking procedures for reviving pilots and sailors who fell into the North Atlantic Ocean.
Imagine for a minute that Democratic vice presidential candidate John Edwards’ cruel and astonishingly vulgar promise that a Kerry victory will result in paralysis victims rising from their wheelchairs were in fact feasible. And imagine that it could be done with spinal cords transplanted from infants conceived for the purpose. I doubt that even Christopher Reeves would have wanted to walk again if it meant creating organ farms where baby humans were cultivated for what adults could harvest from them.
But the sad fact is that John Kerry is not even subordinating ethics to science. He’s subordinating ethics to political demagoguery, because the truth is that the promise of embryonic stem cells is fantasy. Championing embryonic stem cell research has more to do with bowing before to the abortion lobby’s determination to dehumanize the embryo than it does to making the lame to walk and the blind to see.
Heart attack victims are already profiting from stem cell research, without the destruction of a single embryo, because embryos are not the only source of stem cells. And in fact stem cells have been saving and improving lives for decade. Mostly it has been stem cells collected from umbilical cords that have yielded the most useful stem cells.
Someday, stem cells might help repair a severed spinal cord. But based upon the current state of the science, the most likely source of those stem cells will be the patient’s own adipose tissue. Nerve cells have already been grown from adipose stem cells. No one has ever induced an embryonic stem cell to convert itself into a nerve cell. And the adipose stem cell has the other advantage of being a homologous transplant, sparing the patient from a lifetime of complications and expense from immunosuppressant drugs.
If the stem cell debate were about science, rather than the abortion agenda, then John Kerry would not be promoting embryonic stem cell research. He would be encouraging adipose stem cell research. But where is the controversy there? It’s more politically expedient to blame Bush for Ronald Reagan’s death from Alzheimer’s.
Liberals have made embryonic stem cell research a sort of sacrament. To prove one’s worth, one must be willing to destroy human embryos on the altar of a false science.
There is only a limited pool of resources available for biomedical research. Funding embryonic stem cell research will divert money from the more promising adult stem cell research. Were a victorious Kerry to fulfill his promise to divert money into embryonic stem cell research, then he would push the day that the lame throw down their crutches farther into the future.
Sixty years ago, the medical community was faced with a moral dilemma. The data that Nazi scientist derived for their experiments on doomed death camp Jews might actually advance medicine. Conceivably, human lives could be saved if Nazi discoveries were disseminated through medical journals. The scientific community pondered the question and sided with morality. Even if the knowledge were useful, the means by which it was learned was too vile.
Interestingly, Nazi data eventually found its way into mainstream science. And not surprisingly, this change of attitude came not long after the United States Supreme Courts gave us Roe vs. Wade.