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The President, The State of the Union, and Genetics
At last night's State of the Union, the president said "Tonight I ask you to pass legislation to prohibit the most egregious abuses of medical research, human cloning in all its forms, creating or implanting embryos for experiments, creating human-animal hybrids, and buying, selling or patenting human embryos."
Jamie happened onto a link today which humorously and insightfully
addresses this bit from the speech. It's worth your time. Relatedly segphault writes "Ars Technica has an interesting look at scientific research and technology proposals included in Bush's State of the Union address."
If you have examples of the same people making both arguments, you have a point. Otherwise, just chalk it up to the fact that a bazillion people post here, and it's likely there are a lot of people on both sides of the issue. "Slashdot" is not a guy with two sets of opinions that contradict, it's a lot of people with their own opinions in one place.
I'm not opposed to GM anything. I do, however, wish we'd spend a little more time testing things out before deploying them on a large scale, and a little less time suing farmers whose crops accidentally cross-pollinated with a patented GM species next door.
Not sure I want to see any Republican sponsored social security reform but it is a completely broken program and I would be overjoyed if tomorrow it went away and they just gave me a lump sum payment back of what I've paid in. Of course they can't since everything I've paid in has long since been squandered much of it on pork, fraud, waste and abuse and recently to fund tax cuts for the wealthy. Only way I get my money back is from more payroll taxes on workers younger than me.
I guess I'm saying the Dems are just as wrong in defending the status quo as the Republicans are in their "reform" programs which are scams in their own right.
Social Security as conceived by Roosevelt was kind of scam since very few people lived long enough to collect it and the tax rates could as a result be very low. Unfortunately most people live long past retirement age now and as of around 1980 the tax burden on working people went through the roof. Counting the hidden employer contribution payroll taxes are now an inescapable 12.5% of your wages. People say low and middle income people don't pay a lot of taxes, well they conveniently leave out this inescapable payroll tax.
What we have today is America's greatest generation, the World War II generation, who paid very little in payroll taxes and are now living to their 80's and 90's thanks to better medical care. They are making out like bandits, with a huge return on their investment. Baby boomers will also reap big windfalls though not as big a windfall. Where does this windfall come from, why off the backs of younger workers who are paying a STEEP percentage of their income to fund the program PLUS a big surplus that Congress and various Presidents are squandering on other programs. These younger workers may discover when they retire the program has been eviscerated and they get back less than they paid in if they are lucky. At present Social Security and Medicare are cannibalizing young workers to support seniors.
So can Social Security be reformed today? Not really because the greatest generation and the baby boomers are a powerful lobby and they wont let anyone touch their windfall. They vote in disproportionately high numbers while young people vote in low numbers. They are a powerful lobby.
The result is the only reform you will see will impact younger workers and end up cutting their benefits compared to today's seniors or end up costing them or younger generations even more in taxes. NO ONE IS TOUCHING THE WINDFALL TODAY'S SENIORS ARE REAPING OR BABY BOOMERS WILL SOON REAP and which will push the system in to the red in a decade or so.
What do the Republicans want to do. They want to force you to put payroll taxes in to private financial funds which they will strictly define and regulate. It kind of sounds like a good idea but it has a few problems:
- You still wont really have control of the money because they will tell you exactly what you can and can't do with it.
- The main thing they are trying to achieve is to take a mandatory payroll tax and put it under the control of giant private financial institutions who are huge contributors to the Republican party. They in turn will reap huge windfalls from manipulating this huge influx of money workers will have to give to them by law. Chances are it will cause a large bubble in the stock marker or wherever else it is invested. You can hope it goes in to stable investments that always appreciate but there is a fair chance it will land in investments where the workers actually end up losing money while Wall Street fat cats profit.
- When all this money disappears in to private funds there will be a huge shortfall in paying benefits to current seniors and SOME LUCKY TAX PAYER is going to get to pick up the tab, and it probably isn't going to be the rich, OR the government is going to borrow ever more staggering sums to cover the shortfall which will further destabilize the dollar and the U.S. economy.
The Republicans have made huge payoffs to their
@de_machina
The attempted humor in the replies pains me, because this is actually a *very* serious issue that could cripple human disease research in this country if gone about ham-handedly.
For all you non-bio-geeks out there, we use animal models to study disease because there are many experiments you can do on a mouse or a fly that are either impractical or wholly unethical to do on humans. The trouble is that mice and men are different, so it's rare to find an animal model that perfectly replicates the human disease. But we often get close. One way we get close is by inserting human disease genes into mice. Or rats. Or frogs. Or worms. Or flies. So we can study in great detail exactly what those malfunctioning genes do. These animal models are technically chimeras - animals carrying human genes. But without them applied medical research, the stuff that finds cures for disease, would grind to a halt.
Then there's the issue of biotechnology, actually creating and producing those cures. Another poster said that recombinant insulin is made by inserting the human insulin gene into other organisms - usually, I think, bacteria. Every recombinant drug is made the same way. So are the many antibody-derived drugs now reaching market (Herceptin, etc.). There's fundamentally no way around this. It's utterly uneconomical to mass-produce these drugs in vitro, using all-purified enzymes, and we don't even always understand how to do that. These drugs are already absurdly expensive, and much research has been devoted to developing new methods to produce them more cheaply (in cows' milk, for example).
So this is all no joke. Given the record of the people in charge in all branches of government, I don't think we can assume that they thoroughly understand the issues and will craft appropriately rational legislation. If dealt with flippantly, through the usual partisan talking points, this *will* become a medical and scientific train wreck.
Some people like to argue that the current administration is actually increasing funding for research, something in the order of billions of dollars. True, missions like the one to Mars, which may not be feasible, do get more attention. Now, let me illustrate what effect the actual decrease of funding in nuclear research has on science. Last year, Dr. Christoph Leemann, Director of the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility (JLab) sent a clear message (read it!) to all staff and users at JLab. This is alarming! For most people outside the scientific community it is probably hard to imagine what the loss of 45 jobs at JLab means. The situation at other labs, such as the Brookhaven National Laboratory is very similar, if not worse. Let me assure you that this cut has serious consequences for a lot of people at many research labs and universities in the US. We will see how this changes education in the US.
There is more information available at the APS Public Affairs web site.
"The NSF's budget has increased every year during the Bush administration."
That's a totally meaningless statement. The NSF budget has increased almost every year since its inception, regardless of presidential administration.
"Oh yeah, and the NIH budget doubled[pdf] from 1999 to 2003. For several of those years, a man named George W. Bush was president."
Yeah, that's nice. Bush also added an entirely new research arm to the NIH (bioterrorism), capped NIH budget growth to 2.5% in 2004 and 2005, and is proposing a nearly 30% cut in NIH funding in 2006. He's a real friend to the sciences. But, hey...at least he dramatically increased funding for weapons development! Yay!
Seriously...you have to be either stupid or willfully ignorant to think that George Bush has done anything to help the sciences. And IAAS, so I know what I'm talking about.
Let's try not to let fact interfere with our speculation here, OK?