President Obama has often claimed that his administration will pursue policies designed to breach the cultural and political divides that rend our country. He has also promised to bring "transparency" to the principal actions of his administration. Unfortunately, the president violated both of these assurances in his recent executive order on embryonic stem-cell funding.
The mainstream media--still obsessed with discrediting all things "Bush"--focused gleefully on the expected rescission of the restriction that under Bush limited federal funding to embryonic stem cell lines in existence on August 9, 2001. But opening up all existing and future embryonic stem cell lines to federal funding is not all that Obama did. While he made no mention of it in his widely covered East Room speech, a quiet press release issued on Monday stated that in addition to the above change, "Executive Order 13435 of June 20, 2007, which supplements the August 9, 2001, statement on human embryonic stem cell research, is revoked."
That opaque notice tells us absolutely nothing. But a little research makes clear why the administration was so terse: The 2007 executive order required the government to make a point of funding what are known as "alternative methods" for obtaining pluripotent stem cells. These are procedures that don't require the destruction of embryos to derive these powerful cells, which are theoretically able to become any tissue in the body. It is this capacity that scientists say makes embryonic stem cells so valuable.
And indeed, the big news in biotechnology in 2007-08--proving
the wisdom of the Bush policy--was the development of a technique known as "cell reprogramming," in which ordinary human skin and other cells are transformed into "induced pluripotent stem cells" (IPSC). This achievement and subsequent advances in research were deemed so impressive and important that the journal Science named the development of the IPSC as the scientific "breakthrough of the year" for 2008.
What makes Obama's stealth action so maddening is that he claimed to support "groundbreaking work to convert ordinary human cells into ones that resemble embryonic stem cells" in his stem-cell speech. But what he did was eradicate the very executive order that guaranteed that such science would be federally funded--an order that as far as I know nobody was lobbying to revoke.
As criticism of Obama's betrayal of alternative sources has slowly bubbled up in cyberspace, some have claimed that he "had" to rescind the order because it contained a clause describing embryos as human life. Here is the offending text from the Bush 2007 executive order:
Section 2 (d) human embryos and fetuses, as living members of the human species, are not raw materials to be exploited or commodities to be bought and sold;
But that clause is not only accurate biology--human embryos and fetuses are not Martian, after all--but also reflects federal law. Besides, if telling the biological truth in an executive order so seared the delicate Obama sensibility, he could have reissued the alternatives-funding order omitting the biological facts about nascent human life--and then publicized it as an example of a bridge across the cultural divide that he has promised to erect.
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