Stem Cells Enter the Presidential Election; Doublespeak Follows
We continue to hope that stem cell research won't be used as a political football during this American election season, or at least that discussion about will be less polarized and misleading than in the past. To date, this hope hasn't been baseless: Both presidential nominees have said they will undo President Bush's restrictions on federal funding. But in the last week, we've seen some discouraging signs.
John McCain's campaign now appears to be trying to play both sides of the issue. On Friday, it released a new radio ad that touts McCain's support of stem cell research, but without mentioning his position on the use of embryos - a common tactic of opponents of embryonic stem cell research. In the past, McCain has supported the use of embryos, but his vice-presidential pick opposes it, and the official platform of the Republican Party takes a hard-line stance. McCain's ambiguous ad may allow him to appeal to centrists while maintaining enough "wiggle room" if he later wishes to change his position.
Proponents of embryonic stem cell research who support Barack Obama quite reasonably want to draw attention to the Republican platform's extremism, and two senior fellows at the Democratic-supporting Center for American Progress highlight it in an op-ed in yesterday's Boston Globe. They cite two recent stem cell advances that relied on new techniques of cellular reprogramming, but go out of their way to attribute them to embryonic stem cells. While they describe the first as growing "out of insights into gene regulation and cell specialization gleaned in part from recent studies on embryonic stem cells," the second development is clearly mischaracterized as being from research with embryos, when it was not.
Hopefully these are not signs that the "stem cell wars" are about to flare up again. But if John McCain changes his position, either before or after the election, then that may be the case.
Previously on Biopolitical Times: