Battle over stem cells
How outmoded capitalism holds science back
By Deirdre
Griswold
A breakthrough in biology in 1998 had the scientific world
agog. Using early-stage embryos donated by couples undergoing
fertility treatment, as well as non-living fetal tissue donated
by women who had terminated first-trimester pregnancies,
scientists at the University of Wisconsin were able to isolate
and successfully culture human pluripotent stem cells.
Stem cells are the very basic stuff of our life. They can
develop into almost all the cell types of the body, such as
muscle, nerve, heart and blood. According to an online fact
sheet of the National Institutes of Health, further research in
this area may help develop "specialized cells that could be
used as replacement cells and tissues to treat many diseases
and conditions, including Parkinson's disease, spinal cord
injury, stroke, burns, heart disease, diabetes, osteoarthritis
and rheumatoid arthritis."
But that's not all. Stem cell research could also "improve
our understanding of the complex events that occur during
normal human development and also help us understand what
causes birth defects and cancer."
Furthermore, the NIH says this research "may help change the
way we develop drugs and test them for safety. Rather than
evaluating the safety of candidate drugs in an animal model,
drugs might be initially tested on cells developed from
pluripotent stem cells and only the safest candidate drugs
would advance to animal and then human testing."
As one would expect, all this was earth-shaking news not
just for the medical community but for anyone concerned about
human health and, for that matter, animal rights.
Today, however, federal funding for stem cell research is
bogged down in a political quagmire. As people with paralyzing
injuries, diabetes and other disabling conditions watch
desperately from their wheelchairs and hospital beds, the Bush
administration is listening to demands of the religious right
that would prevent this great medical breakthrough from getting
the funding to move ahead.
The doctor who first isolated stem cells, James A. Thomson,
could be up for a Nobel prize in biology or medicine. But since
his work was denounced by Pope John Paul II as "immoral," he
can't let the public know where his laboratory is for fear of
the right-wing terrorist groups that have bombed women's
clinics and assassinated doctors who performed abortions.
Angels and schisms
Back in medieval times, when the Catholic Church's
domination of feudal Europe began to crack under the pressure
of an emerging new economic system--capitalism--the clash
between scientific knowledge and church doctrine became the
basis of many schisms. Most people have heard of how warring
church factions formed around the question how many angels can
dance on the head of a pin. It sounds funny now, but many
daggers were drawn over this esoteric debate that concealed
what was at bottom a struggle over the material interests of
different class groupings.
The difference between Bill Clinton and George W. Bush on
stem cell research appears almost as narrow as that old-time
religious schism. In 1996, the Clinton administration, under
pressure of the religious right, banned federal funding of
research that would harm, damage or destroy human embryos. The
Clinton administration then found a way in 1999 to allow
federal money to pay for stem cell projects--but only as long
as the cells were extracted by researchers not receiving
federal funds. Six angels instead of eight angels.
What is needed, of course, is a bold affirmation of both a
woman's right to end a pregnancy and also the importance of
government support for scientific research. The timid approach
taken by the Democratic Party, however, along with the
dependence of the Republicans on the organized legions of the
religious right, is holding back much scientific development in
the United States.
Biology and the medical sciences are not the only areas in
which science is being strait-jacketed in this country. It was
reported recently that the U.S. is far behind other capitalist
nations in the science of climate forecasting, which has
immense ramifications in these days of global warming. Japan,
even though in a recession, is spending $400 million to build
an Earth Simulator that will process 1,000 times as much
information as the typical U.S. computers used for climate
modeling.
Where is the big money going for scientific research? To
Star Wars II, called National Missile Defense by this
administration.
It wasn't always this way.
Early capitalist development spurred science
After the Civil War, when monopoly corporations and banks
were still fighting to gain domination over the economy, the
U.S. was seen around the world as the engine driving scientific
and technological development. A free system of public
education had produced a new social layer of well-educated,
skilled workers.
That was the heyday of progressive social thought in the
United States, not only among the workers but in all social
classes. There was broad public enthusiasm for scientific
breakthroughs. Immense crowds turned out to hear lectures by
prominent scientists and inventors. Religion was losing its
grip on people's minds.
Robert Ingersoll, who not only founded the company of that
name but was also a well-known agnostic, would stand in front
of crowds holding up his pocket watch and dare God--"if there
is one"--to strike him dead in exactly one minute. It was
theatrical--and very liberating for people oppressed by
superstition and fear of divine retribution.
Where did it all go? Why do obscurantism and dogma seem to
have such tremendous political and social weight at a time when
life has become totally dependent on science and
technology?
Why is U.S. television, itself the product of such
sophisticated technology, loaded down with ads for "real
psychics" and "news" stories about the shroud of Turin and
crying Madonna statues? How can evolution be downgraded to a
"belief" along with "creationism"?
Why, when so much has been discovered about the natural
world, do so many turn for comfort to scriptures written nearly
two millennia ago, when people in the Mediterranean area knew
very little about the laws of physics, chemistry and
biology?
Monopoly-ridden imperialism degrades it
This seeming paradox is but a reflection of the outmoded,
reactionary social role of overblown capitalism in the
high-tech world that it has created. Early capitalism ushered
in a profound scientific and technological revolution that
wrenched human society out of feudal slumber and transformed
the way people saw the world. But its development into
monopoly-ridden imperialism has accentuated the cleavage of
society into haves and have-nots on a global scale. In Marxist
language, capitalism widens the gap between the exploiting and
exploited social classes.
It cannot deliver on the promise implicit in the technology
it has created. It can only go on doing what it has done since
the beginning: exploit the majority for the benefit of a few.
Whenever abundance for all seems finally within reach, it goes
into paroxysms of economic crisis.
It has perverted the application of scientific knowledge for
its own ends. For example, U.S. capitalism rushed into nuclear
technology for military purposes, forcing an arms race on the
world. After expending enormous sums of public monies in this
military-controlled scientific effort, it then turned over the
byproduct, nuclear energy, to private corporations to make
profits with no consideration for the long-term consequences.
Is it any wonder that fear and skepticism about
science--indeed, about knowledge itself--have returned?
Nor is medical science above the fray. Quite the contrary.
There is a growing crisis over who will have access to the new
technologies and medicines, who will control the procedures and
decide how knowledge is developed. Will poor people, often of
color, maybe confined to prisons, be the guinea pigs? Now that
organs and limbs are exchangeable, will people be selling their
bodies a piece at a time to survive?
The realization that private greed is a powerful motivator
in the medical industry makes many people fearful about medical
science itself.
Bush may not think about all this when he maneuvers with the
right wing on stem cell research. But he is the enthusiastic
guardian of U.S. capitalism's global empire. He is the enemy of
billions in oppressed nations whose dreams of a better life
through modern technology have been betrayed by the
corporations that keep a tight lock on it and drive them ever
deeper into debt with nothing to show for it.
What Bush does know is that the most committed political
support he can get for his pro-big business, anti-worker agenda
comes from the ideological right-wing, who play on irrational
fears to fragment the masses along religious, ethnic and gender
fault lines.
Limits of bourgeois rationalism
Bourgeois rationalism, which tries to defend the storehouse
of scientific knowledge by promoting logical thought, is not
sufficient to combat this reactionary social movement.
Rationalism's weakness is that it divorces ideas from the
social conditions and class influences under which they arise.
Reason may be used to convincingly pick apart illogical
arguments, but it does not get to the bottom of why social
movements can make headway based on the most flagrantly false
ideas--like the racist ideology of the Nazis, to take an
extreme example.
To understand how this can happen, it is necessary to
examine not only the arguments themselves but the social
conditions that foster them. This holistic approach was first
advanced more than a century ago by Karl Marx and Frederick
Engels. They called it historical materialism. It reveals that
society is torn by class struggle, and that ideas are both
products of and weapons in that struggle.
While natural science requires detachment and impartiality,
class truth requires partisanship--deciding which side you are
on in the class struggle. Bush knows this instinctively when he
flirts with social movements that can doom millions of people
to lives of pain and early death when cures to their medical
conditions may be within arm's reach.
Those who want humankind to take control of the great
scientific and technological establishment and use it wisely
and justly to promote a healthy future for all on this planet
must also come to grips with the class divide in contemporary
society. Which side are you on--the workers' or the
bosses'--doesn't apply only to the 1930s coal wars in Harlan
County, Ky. It is a necessary reference point for anyone who
wants to be effective in advancing human society.
This article is copyright under a Creative
Commons License.
Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011
Email: ww@workers.org
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