Free-market stem cells?
Posted by Marcy Darnovsky November 29, 2006
Biopolitical Times
The libertarian Cato Institute, whose tag line is "individual liberty, limited government, free markets, and peace," is adding its voice to the stem cell debate. And—are you sitting down?—it calls for an "unfettered private sector" to take control of the research.
What Cato director of bioethics studies Sigrid Fry-Revere is proposing in this op-ed in the Los Angeles Times is that we leave all the social, economic, and ethical decisions entailed by this powerful new technology to unregulated profit-seeking players. Concerned about exacerbating health inequities with costly high-tech biomedicine? About women recruited to supply fresh eggs for cloning researchers? About tracking cloned embryos to keep them out of the hands of headline-seeking rogue cloners? Let Big Pharma and the biotech industry handle it.
To her credit, Fry-Revere also says that stem cell scientists should forgo public funding, and rely entirely on private gazillionaires to pay the piper. That may be consistent libertarian logic, but it's a bit of a stretch in the real world. And it’s downright dangerous to any notion of the public interest.
As Fry-Revere acknowledges, billions of public dollars have already been committed to stem cell research by state governments and the feds. And in spite of the Bush restrictions on federal funding of research involving embryos, NIH has spent many millions on adult stem cell research and on the "presidential lines" of embryonic stem cells.
More importantly, much of the underlying scientific knowledge on which stem cell investigations rely, along with much of the training of the researchers who will conduct them, have been paid for from the public purse over many decades. Basic scientific research, like other forms of jointly created knowledge, is part of the commons that we share. There's a place for the market—but we need to keep it in its place, and make sure it follows the rules of the road.
What Cato director of bioethics studies Sigrid Fry-Revere is proposing in this op-ed in the Los Angeles Times is that we leave all the social, economic, and ethical decisions entailed by this powerful new technology to unregulated profit-seeking players. Concerned about exacerbating health inequities with costly high-tech biomedicine? About women recruited to supply fresh eggs for cloning researchers? About tracking cloned embryos to keep them out of the hands of headline-seeking rogue cloners? Let Big Pharma and the biotech industry handle it.
To her credit, Fry-Revere also says that stem cell scientists should forgo public funding, and rely entirely on private gazillionaires to pay the piper. That may be consistent libertarian logic, but it's a bit of a stretch in the real world. And it’s downright dangerous to any notion of the public interest.
As Fry-Revere acknowledges, billions of public dollars have already been committed to stem cell research by state governments and the feds. And in spite of the Bush restrictions on federal funding of research involving embryos, NIH has spent many millions on adult stem cell research and on the "presidential lines" of embryonic stem cells.
More importantly, much of the underlying scientific knowledge on which stem cell investigations rely, along with much of the training of the researchers who will conduct them, have been paid for from the public purse over many decades. Basic scientific research, like other forms of jointly created knowledge, is part of the commons that we share. There's a place for the market—but we need to keep it in its place, and make sure it follows the rules of the road.