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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.""
So he's pissed at Bush for his descision (or indescision, if you take it that way) on stem cell research and how he see's conservatism effecting biological advances, so he doesn't give money to a college to biolgy research in protets? This doesn't make sense. Maybe if he gave his money to a college in Britain that has much more liberal stances on, well, everything. That might start to get the attention of people and make a statement. But this just seems stupid.
F-bacher
James Tiberius Kirk: "Spock, the women on your planet are logical. No other planet in the galaxy can make that claim."
Jesus, he's one of us.
Finally, someone who stands up for science instead of politics.
Course, one has to consider he's MAKING politics by doing this. ^_~
BBCNews have covered this,
which also forms part of one of their 'indepth' news anaylsis.
They also have a link to Stanford where their president has issued his responce.
troodon.net
Driven by ignorance, conservative thinking and fear of the unknown, our political leaders have undertaken to make laws that suppress this type of research.
Ok, so if you are liberal, your thoughts are OK because you are OPEN. But if you are conservative, you're thinking is CLOSED? If you're open to diversity of opinion, then you must accept ALL types of thinking! Bush (not my favorite president to say the least) was struggling with some legitimate moral issues regarding stem cells from aborted fetus. Honestly, I'm sick of people doing things "in the name of science" and calling all moral discussions "ignorant". I don't stand on either side of the stem cell issue, as I have yet to fully understand the moral implications (if any). However, I would say that it's ignorant to scoff those who are attempting to excercise discernment.
There is no longer anything that can be done with computers that is nontrivial and clearly legal. -- Paul Phillips
He is saying biotechnology is the next big thing. He is gonna donate this money, then get federal funding for the research and then patent everything that comes from it and make billions of dollars.
I personally like the ol G Dubya's stand. The big compainies only want the federal funding for research so they don't have to spend the money, yet they still get the patents.
If all these big companies think its sooooo important to have more than these 60 stem cells why don't they fork over the money for the research? Last I saw these companies weren't hurting for money, yet they had plenty of patents.
What really chaps my hide about this whole debate is that both sides seem to be deliberately ignoring the the fact that human embryos are not the only source of human stem cells. Proponents of stem cell research instist that only embryonic stem cells will do, and don't want to be bothered with researching the viability of stems cells taken from adults or the placenta and/or umbilical cord of new-born babies. Those who oppose the use of embyonic stem cells often blindly lump the other sources of stem cells right in with them.
In the end, we end up with perfectly legitimate means of aquiring stem cells being ignored, because both sides have gotten on their high horses and, instead of working with researchers and ethicists to find a way to achive the goals without destroying/killing embryos*.
This is what happens when a scientific and/or ethical issue (there doesn't seem to be too many scientific issues that aren't also wrapped up in ethical issues) enter the real of politics. All reasonableness and willingness to act for both the physical and ethical/moral well-being of others goes out the window. It becomes and issue of power and who will dominate who.
* And I don't buy the, "well, they were going to be gotten rid of anyway" argument. Just because someone else was going to kill your neighbor down the street if you didn't doesn't mean it's ok for you to go ahead and do it.
While you may feel one way or the other on the issue, calling the roughly 45-55% of the people in the USA known as conservatives in this country "a few" is a lie. (Big suprise, though)
I guess those "a few" get around..
Pan
I said no... but I missed and it came out yes.
and oh, say, 100 million for stem cell lobbyists.
Why? Why just not use the 100 million for stem cell research? I think 90% of the people don't get the fact that they are only limited to 60 stem cells for Goverment Funding. You can use as many stem cells as you would like if you get funding from somewhere else.
Having taught electrical engineering at Stanford and benefited there from federal research funds, I can say that with no prospect of federal support, significant scientific inquiry in a field like stem cell research will stop. No research leader can forgo federal money.
Oh puhleez. There have been virtually NO federal funds spent on embryonic SCR, and that doesn't seem to have much hindered researchers so far. The TRUTH here is that these researchers saw easy, string-free government money, and now they're just pissed because it's been limited on them. Let's make the situation clear: scientists who DO NOT have the funds to continue their research have been given open funding by the government to work with the sixty specified lines as they see fit. Scientists who DO have funds can work on any cell lines they want, and do virtually anything with them. These people were thumbing it, we've offered them a free Cadillac, and now they're complaining that it's not a Mercedes...sheesh!
Could funds-free researchers do more with unlimited lines and no control? Sure they could, but when you're on the equivalent of scientific welfare you should be happy to get what you get. It is NOT the duty of the taxpayer to provide unregulated or unlimited funds to every scientist who think he can save the world...if only we'd give him a little money. Those sixty lines are as viable as any other embryonic lines currently available, and should provide a solid foundation for whatever projects those researchers may be pursuing.
Personally, I wish that Bush had added one more restriction to the pile. People like Clark are complaining because his visions of getting even wealthier were set back a bit by GW's decision. Clark, like many financial backers of SCR, were hoping to parlay early investments and later government money into huge financial gains for whatever breakthroughs they attained. MANY people in the field want to use government money to make a big breakthrough, so that they can then patent, control, and royalty-fee it to death. They want to use YOUR money to make THEM rich. Screw that. IMO, any government funding should come with the stipulation that discoveries MUST be passed into the public domain and remain royalty and patent-free. I have no interest in having MY tax dollars spent on projects designed to make people like Jim Clark richer.
There is nothing so pathetic as seeing a beautiful young theory roughed up by a tough gang of facts.
you think those things that get government funding don't also get patented?
The US government didn't ban stem cell research, all Bush did was prevent the government from directly funding research on new cells. Private industry and nonprofit groups can still do whatever they want with the existing or new cells, so long as they use their own funds.
That said, Clark could distribute some of his billions to those groups to make up for money the government won't be giving them. But instead he's going to have a hissy fit and withhold that cash just to draw attention to himself (if he had given, we wouldn't have seen the story here). He's cutting off his nose to spite his face; shooting himself in the left foot because he's mad someone shot him in the right. It's totally counterproductive for him to do this.
And it could be worse for him - imagine a scenario where Jim Clark was taxed at 90% and had no free money of his own, and then the government decided who and what got the money taken from him. Jim Clark should thank God and George W. Bush (I'm not putting them on the same level) that he lives in a nation where he can choose who and what gets his money instead of having it chosen for him. Jim can send his Bush tax refund check and a whole lot more over to BioWhoever and let them use it for cell research instead of just bitching about Bush not sending the money straight to them. Bottom line: Jim, put your money where your mouth is or stop whining.
== Paul Rickard, Editor of The Microsoft Boycott Campaign ====
Forced-birthers are too hung up on the quantity of potential life and demonstrate almost no concern about the quality of life for those who have developed nervous systems and can appreciate it. Their real concern is probably not life, but power. Religious extremists need to shut up and deal until such time as I can opt out of paying for oil wars in Saudi Arabia.
All in all, I think it's good that a leading technologist (who has done more for society than the sadistic oppressive whore known as Mother Teresa) suggested that mysticism has no place in science.
-jhp
/. -- the Free Republic of technology.
Yeah, well, that's sure of hell true when the private donors desert researchers in their very hour of need, breaking promises in the process. It seems likely to me that this has less to do with principle than with Mr. Clark feeling a little less rich than he used to.
Slashdot - News for Herds. Stuff that Splatters.
Everything you've said about Europe being better basically has to do with the difference in the size of the US vs. Europe---both in people and in area. For example:
1) It's alot easier to be better in telecommunications when your country is the size of one of our states. We're still trying to get cell towers to every part of the US, because its so big.
2) Public transit only works if you have a large number of people in a small area (see New York). In the US, most people prefer to spread out and live in the suburbs---doing things like owning their own house.
3) Television. To upgrade us to HDTV you have to upgrade the facilities of each and every local network in every big and small town. That's not a small task
Frankly, I can't believe how quickly intelligent people want to go down this stem cell road. Come on, did you read Brave New World and think it was a *good* idea? Did you see Gattaca and say "I want a society like that!". Don't you want to take a small step back and look at the ethical ramifications of using stem cells, with their own distinct DNA, as fodder for whatever experiments we want to conduct? Don't you realize this is not an end, but a beginning of some huge ethical situations?
And not to mention that embryo stem cells have a big disadvantage over adult ones---namely the fact that they have different DNA and will be as prone to rejection as any other transplant. Adult stem cells, of course, don't have this problem.
You guys have the typical American attitude that the world stops at our borders. You probably think that Dubya's stupid, incoherent, and superstitious decision is going to kill stem cell research worldwide the way it's been killed here, don't you? As if no scientific research takes place anywhere else in the world except here in America, because we're so wonderful and advanced. Just look at our high school students' test scores in math and science. Look at all our native-born scientists (all ten of them). And just look at our president. We're very scientifically literate.
By not giving his $60 million to Stanford, Clarke can instead give it to a research facility that can do useful research with the money- without being hampered by illogical directives from a president who is openly hostile to scientific research. Bush has prohibited all potentially meaningful stem cell research in this country. But stem cell research (or cryptography research, or any scientific research for that matter) is not going to stop just because it's been prohibited in the U.S. by American zealotry and corruption.
Stanford is still getting money from Clarke- just $60 million less of it. They're still getting much more than that from him for other research (that the American government has not yet forbidden). Anybody who chooses to waste $60 million, by donating it to researchers who have been forbidden by the American government from making effective use of it, is a fool.
In related news, Russia is warning its programmers to avoid traveling to the U.S.A. I feel so proud to be an American.
And some of the public transit is way better than anything in the US...
That's because public infrastructure is much more socialized in Europe. But, since socialized spending does not produce innovation because only large private corporations can produce innovation, you must therefore be mistaken about the public transit being better over there.
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'
"...only large private corporations can produce innovation..."
Just in case you are not being sarcastic (and there are quite a few people who believe this sort of thing), how do you figure? You don't think innovation happens at places like NIST, CERN, LANL, NASA, etc. as well as in research universities? Check out all the Nobel Laureates here:
http://www.nobel.se
I think you'll notice most of them are from universities and gov't labs. And I just got back from a trip from Germany/Switzerland/Austria. I can positively tell you the public transit in the US by and large blows donkey balls compared to that of any of those 3 countries.
Seriously, though, this piece seems absurd to me. Whatever your views about stem cell research (personally, I think Bush came up with a fair compromise, and I'm no fan of Bush), clearly the ethical implications of biological research are crucial and are going to become even more so. Does Clark really think that _not_ having guidelines is the way to a bright future?
By the way I agree that characterizing the voters who don't think precisely as Clark does as "a conservative few" is a contemptible bit of class bias. Those people may not rub elbows with Clark, but that doesn't mean they don't exist.
This is something I've been starting to get concerned about. I'm seeing a pattern here. We have the DMCA squelching legitimate research in cryptographic areas. Russia has even gone so far as to put out a travel advisory for its programmers who are considering a visit to the US. Some academic conferences are also talking about meeting somewhere OTHER than the United States in the future. To avoid DMCA complications -- such as having conference speakers arrested.
Now we are also having restrictions on research on stem cells and nonreproductive cloning. As is well known, there has already been one prominent scientist in this field who has left the U.S. to do his research in England, where the government isn't nearly so hostile towards this kind of research. If I remember correctly, his work was ENTIRELY privately funded. But then it turned out that in one of the buildings he did some work in, the lighting was paid for -- at least in part -- by federal funds. And so because of that, his entire laboratory counted as government-funded, making is research illegal. The only option would have been to build an entirely new building, using nothing but private funds, to do the research in.
Unfortunately, compared to government funding, Jim Clarks $150 million would only be a drop in the bucket. Scientific research often depends on government support as its lifeblood. Especially expensive research.
The United States has for so long been a great example to the rest of the world of how much progress can thrive in a friendly environment with government support and academic freedom. (And, incidentally, freedom of speech.) But now it seems that we are determined to relinquish our crown as the world's leader in new advances in science and technology.
Someday -- far too soon, I fear -- the brain-drain will no longer be from other countries losing their best and brightest to the United States, but rather the other way around.
Umm... no. He was going to donate the money to Stanford, not fund a startup with it.
The big compainies only want the federal funding for research so they don't have to spend the money, yet they still get the patents.
Possibly (companies always want something for nothing), but consider it from Joe/Jill Citizen's point of view. If Federal money funds the research then the government / public sector gets guaranteed dibs (low-cost licenses) to any resulting technology. Whereas if the research is funded solely by private interests, guess who reaps the rewards.
If all these big companies think its sooooo important to have more than these 60 stem cells why don't they fork over the money for the research?
Oh don't worry - they will. And so will the UK and other more enlightened governments. It's just the US public sector / universities that are in danger of falling behind.
-Renard
If only we had _unlimited federal_ funding in the _US_ we might not have disease. People might not have to die. We'd live forever.
Well, if we had limited but unconditional funding, we might have new skin for burn victims, or new kidney cells for diabetes patients, or real treatment for spinal cord injuries so that patients could walk again. While a cure for Alzheimer's might not help us "live forever", everyone agrees that it would be a nice thing to have during the last 10-15 years of life. You are disingenuously reducing the issue at stake to simply making people live longer, which is not the promise of stem cell research at all and would be a dubious benifit at most.
It's wrong to take another human life to save another. I know many Slashdot readers don't consider embryos to be alive (and their all going to be destroyed anyways), but a lot of people do. A lot of people aren't willing to overlook the means because of the ends.
Then where is your outrage against the fertility clinics themselves, who are the source of all these embryos? There isn't a peep from you morons on this subject. Because if the purpose is to make a baby, you are willing to overlook the means because of the ends. You concentrate all your energies on who gets them after they're not needed anymore- stem cell researchers, or the garbage can? Now they'll all be thrown out, thanks to you. Meanwhile fertility clinics continue their operations without any interference or harassment, since you take it for granted that abortion clinics are the source of all these embryos anyway- which they are not.
What if someone decided that it was OK to harvest organs from orphans less then a year old?
We'd say they were nuts. (What are you singling out orphans for, anyway?) But if it was a kidney, and if it were, say, to save a twin's life, then maybe some of us would agree that the transplantation made sense. We'd have to weigh the situation and make a reasonable decision based on it, something which you seem to assume is impossible.
I mean, is a three month old baby alive? It can't talk, it can't sue anyone, it can't even feed it self. If no one put food in front of it, it would die.
This is a really strange definition of being "alive". I think we can all agree that if a live 3 year old baby fails your criteria for being alive, the baby is still alive- your definition is just stupid and needs more work.
So why can't we SAVE the lives of `wanted' children with `unwanted' children? Because it's wrong, it's murder. Some may accuse me of forcing my right-wing extremist conservative religious views on other people, but you have to draw the line somewhere.
So you have drawn your line in the craziest place imaginable, because of your hocus pocus religious beliefs, and now you demand that the world conform to your wishes and adopt your line as its own. Who gave you the impression that the line was yours and yours alone to draw anyway? The truth is that no line you draw will ever be in the correct place in all cases. You leave yourself no room to account for exceptions, special cases, and emergencies. Quit drawing silly lines for us.
I guess well all just have to spend our tax money on boring things like cancer research. Ugh. How many lives will THAT save?
Don't be so smug. Cancer and embryology are closely related fields. Bush has stuck a knife into the heart of U.S. cancer research with this ignorant and superstitious decision.
People always make fun of Stalin for declaring computer science to be a "false science" and squashing all research in it in his own country. Bush apparently thinks this is a mistake worth repeating.
I'm going to help out the majority of you by explaining a few simple concepts of the US Constitution, as well as some principles of the free market - because most of you desperately need this assistance. It really bothers me that so many are so ignorant of the truth. Whatever you think the moral implications are of stem cell research, the fact remains that federal funding of it is unconstitutional. Most individuals on both sides of the political spectrum seemingly forget that the Constitution - the highest law of the land - settles nearly all of the issues concerning the size and scope of the federal government. It's when we as a nation choose deviate from the Constitution that we have problems.
People may not want to admit it, but the Constitution of the United States of America prohibits federal stem-cell research funding. I'm not saying that it prohibits the research altogether, but it does prohibit federal funding. If you don't believe me, just take a look at Article 1: Section 8 of the Constitution, which details the powers granted to Congress.
You won't see an "indiscriminate spending clause" or a "total jurisdiction clause" in there, because the federal government was never, ever granted those types of powers. The federal government is limited to some specific duties with very little wiggle room beyond that. The founders created a limited government purposefully, one that would serve to protect the nation militarily; one that would serve to preserve personal liberty. The founders did this because they hated the cesspool of European politics, and they knew the tendency for government to constantly expand and impose its will on its citizenry.
Federal funding for stem cell research is simply unconstitutional; a majority of the taxes imposed and duties executed by the federal government today are also unconstitutional. The legality of stem cell research must be left up to individual states, and the funding for that research must be left up to the private sector.
The checks on the federal government also arose from the realization that government can never match the private sector's performance. The simple economic principles of supply and demand and competition are at play here. When the government sets forth to complete an objective, it obviously has no competition and therefore no reason to work well. The government doesn't have to worry all that much about profits or losses - if it needs more money, it decides to tax the citizenry more. And the government can choose to embark on the wrong quest because it isn't constrained by supply and demand. The government is simply terrible at handling things that belong properly to the private sector.
The private sector, in contrast, will constantly improve products and services - making them better and cheaper - because if one company doesn't strike, its competition will surely do so. Capitalism is the only way to go, and the subversion of capitalism, like the subversion of the Constitution, will send us down a dark path.
A good recent example of the power of the private sector is the human genome project. The federal government provided funding to one group of scientists to do the work, while another group of scientists utilized the private sector. The government funded researchers had modest goals for completion of the product, when compared to the privately funded researchers. Long story short, the privately funded scientists finished much farther ahead of the government's scientists, simply because they had the incentive to succeed. The government's money was useless, because the private sector yielded completely superior results; the government didn't care about the money spent because they were only spending the people's money.
And if you still can't grasp my point about government entering into the private sphere, please think for yourself for a moment about the government programs you like or think are productive. Can you think of any? Tell me if you like any of these public sector programs:
The ever increasing cost of health care, courteous of government over regulation; subsidized government slums; the continued decline of American public education, despite the fact that the government spends a great deal more on it than it did 20 years ago; airline delays resulting from stone age technology employed by FAA air traffic control systems; being taxed half of your income; the sham of social security; privacy violations (carnivore, etc.); the IRS. . . Which of these features do you like?
If you like any of that, you must also want the government to encroach on the rest of the private sector. Would you like government fast food and government clothing? Would you like a government controlled Internet or government controlled computer corporations? Government control of the media? Should the government take over all property rights? I mean, since most of you believe that the government should have a role in funding everything, it's only logical that the government should have control over even more than it has now - it should, according to most of you, control everything. What a commie-fascist paradise that would be, huh? The really problematic thing is, though, this nation's concept of government would only have to mutate some additional steps before American totalitarianism would be realized.
Look, I'm not some kind of militia nut; I'm not preaching open rebellion against the sovereign. If what I've written has caused even one person to rethink his or her politics, then I would be a happy libertarian Republican. It is a real struggle to teach the truth, but it must be done. I will never back down when some challanges my principles, but no one ever said standing up for what's right is easy.
If you appreciate any of the points I've made, I encourage you to read your Constitution and live by it - don't just pay it lip service. Vote for those candidates who are truly committed to ending unconstitutional practices of government; vocally support those personalities who share a like opinion. We must make a choice, on this day, to either be committed to liberty and the true American way, or else choose automatically to submit to the inexorable march of this nation toward totalitarian rule.
Part of the hardcore faithful who believed in Apple long before it was cool again to do so
The American Government knows that if biological research is allowed to grow widly without controls, the results will be disasterous. This is the same reason that human cloning is being banned outright. It would open doors to the use of human life without accountability or assurance of ethical conduct.
If fetal stem cell research went unregulated, then fetuses would become a commodity to be bought or sold. Imagine waking up tomorrow in a world where a woman can get pregnant, have an abortion, and sell her unborn child on the black market for.. lets say $100,000. Then she could go have another night at the bar scene, and a few months later she'd get another $100,000. Lather, rinse, repeat. If she does this a total of 10 times, then she's just made a million dollars, and 10 children are dead.
Then suppose she's not independent, suppose she's a prostitute. A pimp with a dozen girls could make $1,200,000 per year this way.
I know this sounds wild, and will probably never happen, but if we don't impose restrictions and safeguards on biological research then something similar - or worse - could happen.
And by picking conception as the beginning of life you are faced with a huge moral dilemma. Since each and every one of your cells can potentially become a twin brother to you, how do you face killing thousands of people when you scratch your head? Can you forgive yourself the billions of brothers you will have killed by the time you reach old age? Not to mention when you kill other peoples potential siblings by shaking hands or something. Mass murder.
A cell is a cell. There is no magic in a newly fertilized egg that cannot be reproduced with technology (altho it would be expensive and impractical). Or are the newly fertilized more worthy of life because they happen to be in the right environment with the right cellular membrane?
Go ahead, choose fertilization as the beginning of life for humans. But if a single cell is a human life, then man are you gonna have a problem with guilt.
Um, I think he's being sarcastic.
Honestly, can you name any large corporations that have produced any innovation at all? I can only name a small handful: IBM (there seems to be a slashdot article about a new innovation from them every week), Bell Labs (which is now gone), perhaps Qualcomm (for CDMA). Oh yeah, the pharmaceutical companies too. Producing innovation requires supporting basic research, something that most companies just don't do anymore because it doesn't produce short-term profits. Most companies only copy other people's innovations, then implement them better or market them better.
" I agree with going full-speed ahead with stem-cell research, but some people believe it's murder, and if you think that you can't just let people make their own decisions"
Well some people think that god created the world in seven days. Some people think that homosexuals should be executed (read the bible it says so). Some people think the world is flat. Some people think the universe is three thousand years old.
You can't run a country on what "some people think".
War is necrophilia.
Stem Cells come from a freshly fertilized egg, still in the Zygote stage and before Blasti-something phase. Back when it is only between 2 and 8 cells.
I spent a lot of time researching this when my wife and I pursued Invitro Fertilization. Fetuses don't come along until I bleieve 4th or 5th month. They are Embryo's for a while.
The problem with some conservatism is ignorance. You should really look into where Stem cells come from, sometimes they are 'fake' fertilized eggs that have no chance of ever becoming a human.
The last paragraph is my $0.02 and my opionon only. The rest is medical terminology.
As a rock-in-roll Physicist once said, No matter where you go, there you are.
While I can verify that the mass-market lagers are as bad as any I have tasted, on a trip to the States I found that the microbrews and specialty breweries are quite good. Sam Adams, though I suppose it doesn't really count as a "microbrewery" anymore, is available in Australia (and I'd presume also available in the UK) and is quite acceptable.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
As for the US's stone-age cellphone and television technologies, that is another example of how the distaste for government-imposed solutions has its downside - kind of like adoption of the metric system, in fact.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
The difference, to me at least, is that there are societal reasons as well to prohibit murder - namely, that it removes useful members of society and makes people a lot more nervous about their wellbeing. Even in the absence of moral direction from on high, I would still say that murder should be prohibited. Heck, our society is already no longer strictly moral about murder, since we permit the state itself to kill certain convicts.
I don't know that this is the original argument that the poster above was aiming for, but in my mind at least it seems that society should have an adequate reason for banning something, independent from religious or moral reasons, before banning a particular behavior. On the basis of this belief, I do agree with the original poster that it's annoying when morality is used as the be-all and end-all argument on these sorts of issues. People are using morality as a crutch to avoid really thinking about the pros and cons of real life.
I think it comes down to how and from where you construct morality and ethics. If you view morality as imposed from on high by a deity, like a parent scolding a naughty child, then you probably would think that morality always has a place, and an important one at that, in public policy discussions. If you think, like me, that morality is constructed by humans in order to record and enforce individual behavior towards the overall benefit of society, then it will often seem like people just keep bringing up "morality", without even knowing what they're really saying, just to clog up the vital societal debate about biotechnology, etc.
Case in point: cloning. Everybody and their brother on the news was doing a hella handwaving about "troubling ethical issues" with cloning. As near as I could tell, these mostly boiled down to "well, some babies could be deformed". News flash: every day babies are born deformed or mentally handicapped due to Fetal Alcohol Syndrome, yet our society does almost nothing to curb this widespread problem. Until people who think in terms of "morals" are as concerned about FAS (an entirely here-and-now and entirely preventable problem) as they are about cloning (which, in the absence of any real profit in it (remember, it's easier and probably faster to make a human the old fashioned way) will probably never become a widespread practice), then I will continue to wonder about the motives of those who wave the "morality" flag so fiercely.
Sorry to rant on, and that wasn't really aimed at you specifically, just at the general tone of the thread. Whew, are my fingers tired now :)
Your right to not believe: Americans United for Separation of Church and
Who the fuck wants to use a 50 year old TV or 16 year old cellphone? Jesus. Give your head a shake!
--
Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
Wowsa. Far more response to this than I imagined would happen.
Couple of points:
- a number of folk seem to live under the perception that the UK is Europe. News for ya: it ain't. And most of Europe looks at 'em askance: it's an oddball little island country that's out of step with a lot of what's happening in the rest of Europe.
- Not PAL. HDTV.
- American cars are shite compared to the sweet stuff being done by... well, everyone else. Mercedes, Renault, Opel, Peugot, etc. And, please, just because some of those are major-pricey items in the USA, doesn't mean there are more affordable vehicles from those manufacturers: you just can get 'em in the US.
- If you haven't experienced the European advanced cellphone technology/culture, you really can't contribute intelligently to any discussion on it. What they're doing -- and the impact it has on how people interact -- is beyond your imagination.
- The big country, low population argument doesn't wash as an excuse. Canada is bigger, with one-tenth the population, and is far ahead of the USA on several fronts; Australia even more so; etc.
Ever notice that the pace of change is accelerating? Only the nimble companies -- and nimble nations -- are going to survive.
The USA is a dinosaur country these days. There are several factors at play here, and these have been identified by the people in this thread.
It's time to rethink corporate and cultural America, before it's too late.
--
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Actually, the libertarian position is that this is precisely one of the very few appropriate roles for government: Protecting its citizens from the exercise of force. In other words, preserving the ability of individuals, who are presumed to have free will, to act in accordance with their own wishes -- so long as those actions do not impede the rights of others to do the same.
You make some good counterarguments regarding the FAA and taxation (though I might still argue that having even half of the fruits of my labors confiscated against my will and squandered on programs I don't necessarily support is an obscenity... nah, I'm not in the mood right now). I do want to dispute the way you conveniently shift the blame for health care costs onto insurance companies, though. The financing of health care is admittedly a mind-numbingly complex issue (trust me, I got a tiny but frightening glimpse of this writing billing software for doctors' offices in a past life)... but insurance companies are hardly the biggest culprit in the escalation of costs. (They may well be a culprit as far as quality of care goes, but that's largely a different issue.) Yikes, as I start to prepare my mental arguments I'm realizing I could spend all night on this, but a quick summary: Consider the costs of developing new treatments and drugs; the fact that employer-paid insurance protects most people from price signals and encourages overconsumption; the fact that government payments for procedures under e.g. Medicare typically come nowhere near covering the actual costs of those procedures, so that privately insured individuals end up paying more than they really should; the cost of litigation and insurance against litigation; and the fact that modern, Western medicine is simply a highly complex, labor-intensive, and technology-intensive business, one that people place great emotional reliance on. Oh, and don't forget those omnipresent symbiotic gremlins of supply (somewhat limited) and demand (effectively infinite -- can you ever be too healthy?). I'm sure there are the usual doses of fraud, poor business practices, and so on to top all this off. Anyway, this is getting way off on a tangent, so I'm gonna hit Submit now and be done with it...
"Biped! Good cranial development. Evidently considerable human ancestry."
Incidentally, the data I've seen indicates that between 30 and 50 percent of ALL pregnancies end in spontaneous abortions, often before the woman even knows she's pregnant. If life really begins at conception, shouldn't we be worried about rescuing those billions and billions of unborn babies?
"Biped! Good cranial development. Evidently considerable human ancestry."
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.
- Otto von Bismarck
I just got back from Europe
Europe is much more diverse than the US, and the regional variations of the culture are huge Compare London (western), Madrid (southern), Stockholm(northern), Vienna(central) and Bucharest(east) to get a view of this. The average GNP per person varies with about one order of magnitude between the rich and poor countries.
What part of Europe did you visit? That has very much to do with the quality of public tranport, and the telco stuff, etc. Scandinavia is extremely advanced in use of cellphones (Ericsson, Nokia) and other telco stuff. Central/Southern Europe is more conservative, but in US standard it would probably be not backward. However,you have probably not visited any former Soviet Satellites. In the Rumanian countryside horse-carts are just as common as cars. The public transport is quite good in Eastern Europe, as not that many people can afford any cars. I have seen a car where the windshield was replaced with wood, as the owner could not afford a new one. It was not considered peculiar. Cellphones are quite common in some ex-socialist countries, as the ordinary phone network is underdeveloped. The commie government could not listen to so many phones, so you could have a waiting-time of a decade before you got the phone.
In my experience, Scandinavia has excellent telco network, that is used in ways I think will take decades to implement in US. Checks are not used in Scandinavia. You have automates at malls that allow you to pay your rent and bills (if you don't use the net for paying them) and take out cash, if you are not using a credit card. In Finland, the police uses a cellphone to check your income from the tax register when you get a speeding ticket, as the fine depends on your income. Many younger Scandinavians do not have ordinary phones at all, and almost everyone (more than 90% of the population) has a cellphone.
The public transport varies a lot throughout. My exprience shows that it varies a lot. In Germany or Scandinavia the public transport is excellent. England is also pretty good, although I have not been there in a few years, and people say the railway systems is miserable these days. In Spain, Greece and Southern France, the public transport sucks. The Baltic states and Poland have a pretty good public transport, when you remember that their GNP per person is about 10% of that in US.
Could be a pretty damn fast trip to third-world status.
To become underdeveloped, USA would have to get into a long and steady decline. I think USA might stagnate into current situation, but more likely is a slower development when compared to European countries. Even so, it would take several decades before ex-socialist countries will have standards of living comparable to present USA.
you must therefore be mistaken about the public transit being better over there.
The T is way cleaner and more reliable than the Tube. Still, that's not difficult.
So, you want to compare presidents based on how someone with highly dubious credentials imagines they would do on a test?
WTF is this "Lovenstein Institute", anyhow? Why are they entitled to any more credence than I would give to a Scientology personality test?
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
American universities are at a big disadvantage here, since:
- they are more reliant on federal funds
than drug companies
- they tend to have their research labs on campus
So the recent decision will make the possible progress using stem cells happen abroad and privately, at least moreso than other biomedical researchIt's psychosomatic. You need a lobotomy. I'll get a saw.
If you're reading that from people who are republocrats, don't use those numbers. They only split people between really conservative, and very conservative. Now, if you had several parties (like Canada, et all) where there was a conservative party, a liberal party, a labour party, a more conservative party, etc, you could potentially say how many citizens are "at least conservative enough, or in agreement with the views, of the conservative party" to support them (and imply they are conservative).
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Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
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.
Why the heck should he donate money for research that can't be done here? His money could be used to make a lot more progress if he gave it to a university in Europe instead. Why should he blow his cash on a hobbled US university?
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
In 'new' democracies people still believe the lie that those with money/power will permit their lives to be controlled by those without money/power. Go read Orwell's 1984. Talk to citizens of any major Western democracy. The 'man on the street' has NO influence over national policy except when he is the target of a mass propaganda campaign and votes accordingly.
Hell, I'm very amused by this:
Moderation Totals: Flamebait=4, Insightful=2, Interesting=1, Overrated=1, Total=8.
Obviously, we're not all on the same page!
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Boooolshit.
I live in British Columbia. We laugh at the piddling things you call "mountains," and we have snow and ice that would drive you to tears.
My small car ('91 Nissan NX 1600) does just fine. An SUV is entirely unnecessary. And judging by the accident statistics, is more dangerous in the winter than any front-wheel drive small car.
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Er, you mean the flat-rate, always-on, wireless Internet access that I saw? Yah, damn, that's some inferior...
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WTF? How'd my name get associated with biomedical?! I swear to god, I didn't write anything about it!
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Opps. Touche'. :)
(OTOH, ain't it true? Stomping stem cell research is going to make the USA a laggard on this most-promising line of research...)
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