Stem Cells - The Hope and the Hype

zer0skill writes to mention a CNN summary of a Time cover story. The Truth about Stem Cells deals with an increasingly politicized area of scientific inquiry, and likens the fight to those over global warming and evolution. From the article: "Five years after Bush announced that federal money could go to researchers only working on embryonic stem cell lines that scientists had already developed, Democrats hope to leverage the issue as evidence that they represent the reality-based community, running against the theocrats. States from Connecticut to California have tried to step in with enough funding to keep the labs going and slow the exodus of U.S. talent to countries like Singapore, Britain and Taiwan."

Comments

Misspelled kleptocrats

[dbIII]

running against the theocrats

It isn't really about religeon at all - these people are the merchants in the temple trying to make a buck out of belief. The more hype and conflict the more customers they get - despite the religeon they base their marketing on being one that preaches tolerance and charity.

Our view of our place in the universe is changing

[hey!]

Think of the reaction to the Copernican system, which after all was really just about a simplified model for calculating the position of planets. What difference does it really make to you whether the planets revolve around the Earth, or whether the planets and the Earth revolve around the Sun? None, unless your job is compiling almanacs.

But it's disconcerting to have your place in the universe moved.

A similar thing happened when the techniques of historical research began to be applied to the Bible. The only thing that changed was the idea of the historical process that created the Bible. It is no longer possible to view the Bible as a single unchanging thing that had a few corrupt offshoots. There is no way to trace the Bible back in its current form without concluding that it was pieced together and actively modified over the centuries after it's "authorship". Is there any reason to think this makes the Bible less true if you thought it true before?

But you have to give up part of your intellectual furniture to make room for this new idea.

Now we've reached points on several fronts of scientifc and technological advance that have larger practical day to day impacts on how we view ourselves than the Copernican revolution, and probably more so than Biblical "Higher Criticism".

For example: Are we just the product of a cascade of chemical reactions that can be reproduced in vitro? Do we have to look at the world as finite source of resources and sink for waste?

There are even ones that aren't on the public radar screen, like: Can machines be people? Certainly if somebody made a C-3PO or R2-D2, or even a program that passed the generalize Turing test, you'd have to consider this.

It's not surprising that liberals are more comfortable with this sort of thing than conservatives. It's not that liberals are more scientific, it's that conservatism believes that what is proven is best. But if you find out the world is not what you thought it was, or worse yet you aren't what you thought you were, then it throws old proofs into doubt.

If history is a guide, then the battle lines will be drawn again in the future, in a different place according to rules neither side envisions today. The thing is liberalism and conservatism are less ideologies than they are character traits.