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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
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.
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.
First of all, I'm glad you actually addressed this issue. George Bush somehow neglected to tell America what happens to the leftover IVF embryos not used for research, nor did he express his disgust at the number of "potential" human beings created simply to be tossed in the incinerator. It surprises me that we can so easily tolerate the "mass-murder" that is in-vitro while at the same time being so outraged over the small number of embryos that are used for research.
As far as your not buying the argument, well, what is there to say? Drawing analogies between living humans and a couple of cells in a test tube (cells that will never be allowed to come to term and aren't capable of suffering) is truly a futile intellectual exercise. The embryos are being created, they are being destroyed for IVF. All of this is tolerated even by the right-to-life crowd because it's part of the process of creating life. But embryo research could also have that potential. The potential to save lives that already exist, and are capable of suffering, should be more of a justification than the "artificial" creation of lives that nature wouldn't allow. I suppose it's also worth noting that embroys can be twinned and twinned... So if I destroy one embryo am I guilty of killing one person or all of the "potential" people that embryo might have produced?
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
This is just a gross simplification. Many, many researchers are working in these areas. Believe me, as clever as they are, the media did not invent the notion of using the placenta or umbilical cord to gather stem cells. If you're reading about it, that means that somebody is out there doing the research. Even if non-embryo sources worked as well as embryo sources, halting all research in order to refocus on new ways to harvest stem cells could waste years. During that time, a lot of (real) people could die. Are those lives worth less than the "lives" of a few cells? And how much farther does this go? Should we worry about every reproductive cell our body loses, every sperm cell or egg?
The truth is, the American people are being taken for a ride by a few people with some very interesting ideas. Ask people on the street what they think about stem cell research and you'll get a lot of concern about the destruction of embryos. Ask the same people how they feel about IVF and they'll tell you that helping parents have babies is a good thing. Tell them that embryos get thrown away in the process too, it'll be the first time many of these people have heard about it. A lot of the remainder will justify it with the "creation of life" argument. Given the opportunity for some independent thought, most people won't equate the destruction of early embryos with murder. On the other hand, tell them that evil scientists are creating little babies for spare parts, and these people will freak-- provided the "right" people say it enough.
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?)