Stem Cells and the Man on the Moon: Should We Go There from Here?

In a review of the epoch-making accomplishments of science, Michael Guillen (1995) notes how "we see science going from being a source of light and hope to its also becoming a source of darkness and dread" (5). With Newton we see the earth and the order of nature in a new way, ultimately leading to the moon landing: an entrance into a heavenly realm, unimaginably distant in a previous era. Surely this is "Exodic," opening up a vista for exploration that fundamentally alters the categories and norms of our self-understanding. But when we got there we found it was not the promised land. The moon was barren and dead. In fact, we found this before we even got there: the very condition of our getting there involved divesting ourselves of any myths about its celestial character. Demystified and subject to laws we could master, the moon became something we could conquer. But the rhetoric of conquest is incommensurate with the reality of the ends obtained. So the dialectic of enlightenment outlined by Adorno and Horkheimer (1990) can be seen in science generally: enlightened science promises the means for entering a realm of light and hope, but this means slides over into its opposite, resulting in an empty and dehumanizing rhetoric of justification. Minimally, in the light of the accomplishments of science, we are forced to reassess what has been promised. One way of reading this history is to say that we should be skeptical of all utopian accounts that see the promised land emerging in this-worldly terms.

Within the arena of human embryonic stem cell research we do with human life what we did with the moon: rending the veil of mystery that surrounds the first moments of emergent human life, we divest the early form of soul and eliminate any qualitative difference between it and any other biological commodity that is laid bare within the petri dish. Driven by our desire to master the secrets of early life, we push back the moral norms that have constrained our knife. Cutting-edge science is associated with rending and redrawing the moral boundaries, a process that is guided by the promise of an exodus from disease and suffering into a golden age when wheel-chair bound captives are freed from their biologically imposed slavery.

The question is whether humans are like the moon. Can we be laid bare in those terms, or is something fundamental lost when the moral boundaries of life are redrawn simply to quicken the pace of discovery? Can we demystify, perhaps by means of a more careful usage of our scientific terms? Should we choose to redraw boundaries in order to carve space for this current era of reprogenetic research? These are the questions asked by Zoloth (2002), Maienschein (2002), and Green (2002). And it is clear that each thinks we can comfortably move ahead, justified by the great promise and "magic" of these special cells that would be our prize. The human embryonic stem cell debate is framed as if it were a debate about whether or not to prevent the advance of science, and the authors of this issue articulate the aspects of a consensus among bioethicists that the show must go on. But when one carefully considers this consensus, it becomes apparent that certain aspects of the debate are missing.

The stem cell debate is not just about whether we allow or prohibit the research. It is about whether we should incentivize our best researchers to work in this area rather than in other promising areas that are less morally problematic; that is, should we fund the stem cell research with public funds? Where does one find this aspect of the debate reflected in the consensus literature? If we are seriously concerned...