Sex, Science and Stem Cells
Declan and I had a bit of a challenging weekend: on Friday night at 11.00pm, a homeless decided to nap in the porch in which we have been sleeping since 3 November 2006 despite us being there – a first; on Saturday morning, a half an hour after the Catholic Manna Centre opened Declan reckoned it was better we left, even though it meant going hungry for the day – also a first since we started going there back at Easter (I only go on weekends, while Declan makes the two-hour round-trip walk every weekday to be guaranteed a bite to eat for lunch).
With that background, it didn’t surprise me that out of the 201 emails I sent on Saturday afternoon to scientists and academics inviting them to sign Declan’s petition to the UN on therapeutic cloning, all I got was 14 out-of-office autoreplies (as I explained in the blog of 2 August “I am urinated on in the porch”, the number of out-of-office autoreplies is my best indication as to whether Declan's emails are going to inbox or spam: two or three autoreplies within a batch of 10 would be a good indicator of the former). For instance, I sent 69 emails to scientists of the University of California’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (from which we have a few signatories) and got 4 autoreplies – the last 48 emails yielded no autoreplies at all. I am afraid that the emails I sent to Oxford Brookes University didn’t fare any better: I sent 40 emails and got 4 autoreplies. I didn’t do any emailing on Sunday because the computers in the Idea Store Whitechapel library were down for the day. This morning we had no new signatories – can’t say I expected any.
Sex, Science and Stem Cells, by Congresswoman Diana DeGette
A new book "Sex, Science and Stem Cells: Inside the Right Wing Assault on Reason", exposing the politization of science by the right wing in the US Congress and the heavy influence of the religious right, hit store shelves in the US last week. Its author, Diana DeGette, six-term Democrat Congresswoman from Colorado and a chief architect of the stem cell research bill that was twice vetoed by President George W Bush, told DailyCamera.com: "The reason I did this book now is because as the fall elections approach I wanted to let the American public know how health policies must be based on sound science. The United States is based on separation of church and state, and federal, public health programs ought to be based on science, not on religion."
The Scientific American carries an interview with DeGette in an article dated 5 August titled “Congresswoman Slams Religious Right's Assault on Science's ‘Edgier’ Side”. When, on 19 July 2006, President Bush ceremoniously vetoed the Stem Cell Research Enhancement Act of 2005 (he would veto the Stem Cell Research Enhancement Act of 2007 on 19 June 2007), he was surrounded by children born from discarded IVF embryos that other couples had “adopted” through a Christian agency. Such publicity stunts, DeGette told the Scientific American, have helped kill a wide range of legislation on sex and reproduction: the plan B “morning after” birth control pill, the human papillomavirus vaccine (touted as the best method for preventing cervical cancer), and even sex education. With regard to stem cell research, she says: "I think President Bush was frankly unconcerned about what the public will was. He had a personal religious view and he felt strongly about that. So, he just stubbornly blazed ahead."
DeGette says she wanted to write a book to let the general public know what really goes on inside of Congress, from an insider's perspective. “When I started to write the book, I realized that all of the personal examples that I had and a lot of the issues that I had personally been fighting on all relate back to sex and reproduction. They're not all one thing: They're not abortion. It's stem cell research. It's international HIV/AIDS policy. It's birth control,” she says. Although there have been other issues that the Bush administration has politicized (global climate change, for example), for DeGette “if you want to look at an area that has been thoroughly politicized from top to bottom, it’s the area of sex and reproduction”.
DeGette, who currently co-chairs the bipartisan Congressional Diabetes Caucus (her daughter Francesca was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes in 1998 at the age of 4), charges that there has been a lot of hyperbole around the reprogramming of adult skin cells. “I’m pro-science, so I welcome all of those different types of stem cell research. I think we have moved, not away from embryonic stem cell research, but we have moved to a richer research environment, which was probably likely to happen anyway. The mistake that the press and politicians have made is characterizing this as either/or ... and the one who is the most compelling talking about this is [National Institutes of Health director Elias] Zerhouni, who says all of these types of research support each other and we need to not be making political decisions picking one over the other.”
She thinks that the vast majority of leaders behind “these antiscience arguments” are really making a political calculation, and “the political calculation they're making is: ‘I don't want to anger the religious right, so I'll just go along with this because I think my constituents think this anyway’”. She adds: “I say on page 21 of the introduction: ‘What in god’s name are these people doing? Why does the religious right try to limit scientific advances when they relate to human reproduction? I’ve come to believe that the most extreme (and, frequently, the most influential) right wing advocates seek a country that comports with their view of the Bible. If it was up to them, they would not only outlaw abortion altogether, but all forms of birth control except the rhythm method and abstinence’.” She can’t think of any other explanation why the religious right would so thoroughly polititicize every aspect of sex and reproduction. “I think they want to have a society where it’s really God’s will whatever happens. That’s all well and good within their own families: they can structure their family that way. But, when you're talking about public policy, it's a very big waste of money and it's very dangerous to public health. Teen pregnancy went up last year.”
DeGette admits that she thinks there are a lot of politicians that are afraid of science. “If you say in a vacuum, ‘Science should play a role,’ people get freaked out because a lot of people didn't do so well in high school science or whatever. But, if you say to them, ‘Congress passed a bill that allowed states to give health insurance coverage to fetuses but not the pregnant mother,’ people would say, ‘Well, that's insane.’ I think the devil is in the details.” In her view, scientists and people who care about sound science need to be willing to go on TV shows and radio shows and write op-eds “and talk in layperson's terms about how this politicization is hurting the public policies that affect their lives”. Needless to say, we intend running NAC’s international campaign in support of therapeutic cloning and human embryonic stem cell research with that firmly in mind.
