Charles Krauthammer, come on down! Your columns continue to provide me with blog-fodder. His latest piece, "Obama's Science Fiction", is in tone more reasonable than his previous swill, but no better in content (except to fertilize my lawn with, perhaps). I didn't want to be merely reactionary in this space, but the recent spate of conservative bilge has prompted my hand.
Krauthammer continues to assume scientists lack moral values. I can't credit him with authorship of this; I've heard these arguments from the right for years, and Bush made it part of his public policy. I find the following statement particularly vapid.
"Science has everything to say about what is possible. Science has nothing to say about what is permissible."
Actually, scientists agonize over ethical decisions all the time. In fact, it's a fairly significant component of all grant applications, which provide the lifeblood of scientific research (that's money). However, this is the usual argument from conservatives, that morality and science are mutually exclusive. While oversight of all major decisions is important, and I think ethical review boards have a lot of value, the implication that people intelligent enough to author such research lack the same brain power to consider ethical implications is hogwash. Of course, there is always a small minority that ruins things for the rest of us, although the South Korean researcher a few years ago who claimed to have cloned humans successfully was proven to have made a fake claim.
It's also worth mentioning the Obama plan doesn't allow federal funding for unfettered stem cell research. Government funds cannot go to expanding the number of stem cell lines; rather, they can go towards experiments involving lines that have been obtained from privately-funded research. This was what was banned by Bush, and was effectively the United States' stem cell policy under Clinton.
The impression one gets from reading Krauthammer is that he opines that Bush's arguments (if they can be justified as such) were substantive and "morally serious" while Obama's are flippant. If that's indeed the case, perhaps the Post should consider a stricter drug-testing policy for its employees.
Krauthammer continues to assume scientists lack moral values. I can't credit him with authorship of this; I've heard these arguments from the right for years, and Bush made it part of his public policy. I find the following statement particularly vapid.
"Science has everything to say about what is possible. Science has nothing to say about what is permissible."
Actually, scientists agonize over ethical decisions all the time. In fact, it's a fairly significant component of all grant applications, which provide the lifeblood of scientific research (that's money). However, this is the usual argument from conservatives, that morality and science are mutually exclusive. While oversight of all major decisions is important, and I think ethical review boards have a lot of value, the implication that people intelligent enough to author such research lack the same brain power to consider ethical implications is hogwash. Of course, there is always a small minority that ruins things for the rest of us, although the South Korean researcher a few years ago who claimed to have cloned humans successfully was proven to have made a fake claim.
It's also worth mentioning the Obama plan doesn't allow federal funding for unfettered stem cell research. Government funds cannot go to expanding the number of stem cell lines; rather, they can go towards experiments involving lines that have been obtained from privately-funded research. This was what was banned by Bush, and was effectively the United States' stem cell policy under Clinton.
The impression one gets from reading Krauthammer is that he opines that Bush's arguments (if they can be justified as such) were substantive and "morally serious" while Obama's are flippant. If that's indeed the case, perhaps the Post should consider a stricter drug-testing policy for its employees.
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