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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."
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
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.
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 ====
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.
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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.
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'
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.
I don't think the world is as black and white as you sketch here. For example, those terrible airline delays aren't only caused by aging FAA equipment, they're caused by the deregulated industry's capitalistic incentive to minimize costs by having fewer and larger hubs and maintaining fleets of the barest minimum possible size.
Being taxed half your income sucks and does seem unconstitutional, but it's better than the 90% brackets that used to exist (most ironically even through the 50's, when the nation was in a frenzy to rid itself of those damn communists), and still much lower than most other nations.
I don't see why you think government regulation is responsible for the high cost of health care. Don't you think the insurance industry has a whole lot more say in this? Ask a doctor.
The free market is difficult to apply to health care - you can't really comparison shop. Are you going to have the same operation done by three different surgeons to see who has the best price/performance ratio? Should you have no more qualifications on which to judge your doctors than the content of their advertisements? The unregulated free market solution to health care led to such great products as snake oil and heroin powder.
In principle (yeah, I know), the goverment funds research for things that will serve the public good. If all of this research were only done for a profit motive, then it would benefit only the highest bidder.
The driving force of capitalism is greed. You want your stuff. I don't know who I'm quoting here, but someone said "your property is only yours through the courtesy of those who don't take it from you." Who's protecting your property rights? The police - the government. Care to privatize the police force? That's great if you're the one with the most money to hire soldiers, and it will quickly lead to feudalism, the ultimate in freedom.
Part of government's function is to deal with the fact that we're living in a society and have to have a better way of getting along than just the law of the jungle. Centralized government clearly isn't the answer, but neither is a loose geographic agglomeration of 300,000,000 independent countries.
I've been ranting so long I forgot what I was saying. Well anyway, um, I disagree.
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?)
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.