Anne Applebaum has a column in today?s Washington Post on stem cell research. Her concluding sentence is an admonition (of sorts, if you look for it, at least to me) to take part in the upcoming Shaftsbury discussion.
An excerpt from the column:
?it’s important to be pretty clear about what that national policy actually is, and how it got to be that way. Stem cell research is not, in fact, either illegal or unfunded: The federal budget in 2003 included $24.8 million for human embryonic stem cell research — up from zero in 2000. Private funding of stem cell research, which is unlimited, runs into the tens and possibly hundreds of millions of dollars. The current, admittedly hairsplitting policy came about because Congress in 1995 passed a ban on federal (but not private) funding for any form of research that involved the destruction of human embryos, because it is a form of research many American voters dislike and don’t want to pay for. After some important (privately funded) breakthroughs, the Clinton administration began looking for legal ways to bypass the ban, but never got around to paying for any actual research.
The Bush administration thought about it, too, and came up with a solution: Federal funding could be used for research on stem cell lines already in existence. In practice, this means scientists who get their funding from the government are restricted in which materials they can use. Although this compromise will soon become a real obstacle to research, for the moment the irritant is largely philosophical. “What hampers people is the concept that there is a lack of freedom to operate,” one scientist told me.?
Russell Roberts noticed the same essay and has a post over at CafeHayek.
