Stem Cells: The Scientists Knew They Were Lying?

Public Discourse: Prominent bioethicists Arthur Caplan and Robert P. George on the danger of discounting ethics and overselling science.

AC: I think what science does, relative to the religious discourse, is it tries to protect its self-interest. So scientists generally have a very strong commitment to freedom of inquiry, no matter what the heck they’re doing. I have to say it’s not quite my view. Freedom of inquiry is a great thing. But most scientists also want NIH money, or tax money. Science needs public funds; it’s a hugely expensive public endeavor. So scientists have to make their case to the public. They’re used to doing what they want, under the idea that freedom of inquiry will bring the public the most returns. . . . But at the end of the day, they’ve got to convince the polity and the religious traditions. Sometimes, if you’re trying to make room for scientific advance, you try to play into the divisions of religious opinion.

RG: If scientists knew that what they were doing was hyping it, then—even laying aside the ethical question about the status of human embryos—it seems to be deeply dishonest, clearly wrong.

AC: Here’s an assertion that you hear all the time: “Stem-cell research will help Alzheimer’s.” But stem cell research has no possibility of helping Alzheimer’s. Alzheimer’s is a gunk-up-the-brain disease, where every cell is affected. You can’t fix it by any sort of stem cell research. Model it? Maybe. Cure it? Never.

RG: In 2003 or 2004, a major Washington Post article quoting the central authorities on this made exactly the same point. Now that’s the kind of dishonesty that threatens to alienate the public from science. Because even if the public buys it in the beginning, and the scientists win the political debate, when they can’t deliver on the promises they made, people’s faith in scientists—crucial for the funding of science—is placed in jeopardy.

AC: I think it’s worse. There’s a clinical trial going on in California with private funding, for a spinal cord study. That study is poorly designed, shouldn’t go on—I’ve said so. The model that you want to use on stem cells is in your eyes: if you wreck one, you still have the other, and they’re easy to access. But trying to shoot cells—and you don’t know what they’re going to do—into someone’s spinal cord on the basis of a few rat experiments… If that goes wrong, the hype has been such that when critics come in and say, “it shouldn’t have been done,” it will set the field back to zero. I’ve tried to tell my science colleagues, “If you make a mistake on this first trial, and kill somebody? You can hang it up.” . . .

RG: [O]n the embryonic stem-cell debate, there were people on my side of the ethical question who contended that there was absolutely no reason to pursue embryonic stem-cell research even if the stem cells could be obtained without destroying embryos, because (they said) everything that could be done with embryonic stem cells could be done with adult stem cells and we knew it. Well, I knew that we knew no such thing. To admit the truth that there very well may be uses for embryonic stem cells—not therapeutic uses at any time soon or perhaps ever, but in basic science, or perhaps in the construction of disease models—one needn’t abandon one’s principled position against the destruction of embryos.