Slashdot Mirror
Clark Withholds $60 Million Pledge to Stanford
vocaljess writes: "In an op-ed piece in Friday's New York Times (which you have to register to read, blah blah blah), Netscape creator Jim Clark has announced that he will withhold $60 million he had pledged to donate to Stanford University to build a center for biomedical engineering and science. He states "I believe our country risks being thrown into a dark age of medical research. Biologists are at the threshold of the most important set of discoveries in history, and rather than teach and lead, our politicians react and follow a conservative few. This legislative action will cause the United States to miss a revolution in biology.""
Well, yes, I'd say that if you're "liberal" by your standards and want to trust people and society to navigate difficult moral ground, yes, that's "open."
That's versus "closed," or the conservative vision that government should step in and use the threat of force to coerce individual or social moral decisions. It still hasn't dawned on conservatives (and many liberals, to be fair) that *there may be no one "proper" moral code*.
Yes, there are legitimate moral issues surrounding stem cell research. No, government has no business taking those moral choices away from researchers, academics, and everyday joes.
So yes, the quote you selected is 100% fair. Bush was driven by conservative thinking and fear of the unknown.
-b
If I wanted a sig I would have filled in that stupid box.
We're talking about a man who has second thoughts about donating $60 million because he doesn't think they will come to use in the way he wants it to.
And you're critisizing him?
Heck, I'm having second thoughts about donating $5 without being pretty damn sure that they will come to good use. Dunno about you, but I can't really be upset with anyone who doesn't want to part with $60 million without being pretty damn sure they will be used in a way s/he finds acceptable.
May we live long and die out
Not to say that supporting scientists who persue research within the limits set by Mr. Bush is already a considerable step.
The nice thing about Windows is: it does not just crash; it displays a nice little dialog box and let's you press 'OK'
One thing that I haven't seen discussed (apologies if I missed it and am duplicating a thread) is that grants of federal dollars come with all sorts of strings attached. This is one of the reasons that religious groups are wary of President Bush's proposal to start federal funding of religion-based charities.
The problem with the decision to restrict federal funding of stem cell research is that the restriction also applies to indirect costs. Indirect costs expenses are charged by the universities to pay for building upkeep, electricity, janitorial services, and anything else that is necessary to maintain the research space for the researcher. At Stanford University, for example, for every dollar that a university researcher spends from his/her federal grant, the university charges an additional 60 cents to the grant. The number varies from place to place, but it is usually a surcharge of this magnitude. It's sort of like rent.
In order for new stem cell research to be done in a Stanford University building, no federal funding can be used, direct or indirect. So if a non-stem cell researcher down the hall receives a federal grant, then the stem cell researcher in the same building may not use any money, government or private, to perform research in that building. The restricted research must be done in a dedicated building for which all indirect costs are paid for through private funding. The building costs therefore may no longer be shared among researchers in several fields, but must be paid for by only researchers in the restricted field. A new research lab building costs of order $400 million to build. This amount of money plus the upkeep costs is too much for any single researcher or small group of researchers to raise through private grants. So the main effect of President Bush's executive order is to move new stem cell research out of university research labs altogether, in most cases.
Okay, so the research is moved to private labs run by private companies, so what? The main effect here is that private companies will be reluctant to share new discoveries with the scientific community, unless the research is sufficently advanced to get a patent. Otherwise, there's no way businesses are going to recover their investment. Even worse, new processes can be kept proprietary if it suits the business strategy. Also, there is the phenomenon of the 'strategic patent,' where company A discovers that company B is working on a certain process, and to block them, company A will patent a necessary step in the process to make it cost-ineffective for company B to continue the research. (Note that this doesn't necessarily mean that company A plans on using company B's process.) New discoveries will still be made but the discoveries will come at a slower rate because of the lack of knowledge-sharing and of corporate hijinks.
So the net effect is that people who need new treatments will have to wait longer for them. When they do come, most likely the patents will be awarded to academic researchers in the U.K. or elsewhere and those countries will see the benefits of the new economies formed by this technology.
I wonder if the people who oppose this research now are going to refuse the new treatments developed thereof when it is their kids who are dying. I predict that they will find themselves able to temporarily suspend their moral judgements.
Yes, some people consider killing a fertilized egg cell to be equivalent to murdering an actual human being. No one disputed that. The question is whether or not such a view point is "ignorant". There was nothing in your post to suggest that it isn't, despite your tone of condescension.
Religous conservatives are ignorant of science, history, and usually even their own scripture. For example, in Exodus 21:22 it's explicitly stated that killing a fetus is in no way equivalent to killing a person. The penalty for the first is a fine, the penalty for the second is death.
Fundamentalists reject the accumulated knowledge of the human race because they think all questions are answered in a single book (pick one, any one) written thousands of years ago in our barbaric past. This, my friend, is the very definition of ignorance. Fundamentalists might not like being called on it, but it doesn't make the charge any less true.
They're the same group of people that have opposed every technological change throughout history. They'll have as much success with this crusade as they have with all their others. And they won't hesitate to enjoy the fruits of this research in their old age.
In another generation we'll be shocked that foolish people ever objected to regenerating new livers and such and be glad that we've moved beyond the ignorance of our ancestors.