Science Unstemmed : California's Proposition 71 is just one experiment in Big Biotech's lab of horrors
SMITH, WESLEY J.
SCIENCE UNSTEMMED Q NLY A FEW YEARS AGO, biotechnology...
...he spent years evading the secret police...
...SCIENCE UNSTEMMED Q NLY A FEW YEARS AGO, biotechnology advocates felt pushed into a corner...
...The "Yes on 71" team was confident it could raise it in barrels from entrepreneurs, publicity-hungry movie stars, and wealthy family members of sick and disabled 24 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR February 2005 children who have been told by disease advocacy groups that the Bush stem cell funding policy is pre-venting their loved ones from being cured...
...Like Proposition 71, the New Jersey law explicitly authorizes the manufacture of human cloned embryos...
...This means that everything and anything, other than full reproductive cloning, is allowed...
...In "Free to Clone," author Brian Alexander analogized the work of scientists to that of journalists, stating: "As with journalism, actions that are not strictly speech (research) are so necessary to speech (publishing) that to ban them is to ban speech...
...Nor does it prohibit the implantation of cloned embryos into wombs...
...The late Christopher Reeve appeared in pro-71 ads one week after he died...
...Further evidence that biotech advocates seek an almost unlimited license to clone is found in legislation introduced in other states, which again, under the guise of boosting "stem cell research," would also have permitted cloning and gestation through the ninth month...
...According to the official synopsis, it is merely about "permitting human stem cell research in New Jersey...
...But given the recent track record, it is easy to contemplate an activist court "discovering" a right to research lurking somewhere between the lines of the First Amendment...
...Scientism asserts that all TRUTH comes from unrestricted, unfettered, scientific research...
...A popular President Bush refused to open the federal coffers to unlimited embryonic stem cell research...
...Not only did Proposition 71 issue biotechnologists a radical cloning license and bounteous funding scheme, it also created what amounts to a biotechnology mini-state, the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine, to administer the whole boondoggle...
...Moreover, and more importantly, communicating politically in California, a state with more than 30 million residents, requires extensive television advertising...
...But the drive to legalize and legitimize human cloning is merely a preliminary bout...
...filar...
...The sales pitch worked like a charm...
...Meanwhile, companies engaged in cloning and embryonic stem cell research were dying on the vine because of low investor interest...
...In fact, the language of the bill was so broad that it didn't prohibit giving birth to a cloned baby...
...In other words, since scientific studies can-not be written and published without research first being conducted, scientists must be as free to conduct experiments as reporters are to investigate potential stories...
...Cloning advocates knew this gave them a built-in yes vote for their planned initiative as a way to "defy Bush...
...This is blatant bootstrapping, of course...
...Proponents raised more than $25 million to mount a political campaign steeped in pure hype and appeals to raw emotionalism...
...For his efforts, he has spent 19 years in prison, 3 years under house arrest, and is currently in prison...
...2004 Awards of Distinction in Civil Courage Dan Que Nguyen is a 61-year old doctor who has spent 30 years striving to improve human rights in Vietnam, promoting civil society and a peaceful transition to democracy, and improving the daily lives of people who are suffering both economic and political repression...
...During the floor debate in the New Jersey Assembly, four alarmed members of the President's Council on Bioethics wrote an open letter to then Governor James McGreevy complaining that the legislation would "authorize human cloning and the harvesting and use of body parts of cloned humans in the embryonic and fetal stages of development," acts which the ethicists warned threatened "to make New Jersey a haven for...
...In February 2004, he was beaten and jailed by the riot police for leading a peaceful demonstration...
...Executive Director of Zimbabwe Lawyers for Human Rights and the Chair of the Zimbabwe Human Rights Association, he is one of a diminishing number of professionals advocating for legislative reform, legal representation, and the promotion of human rights in Zimbabwe...
...Proposition 71 passed easily with 59 percent of the vote...
...But the law does not require cloned embryos to be destroyed in the very early stage of development...
...Senate kept human cloning legal in the United States...
...26 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR February 2005 THE CIVIL COURAGE PRIZE (CCP) for steadfast resistance to evil at great personal risk Value: $50,000 2004 Honorees Emadeddin Baghi is an Iranian journalist and writer imprisoned for exposing complicity of the Iranian government in the political assassination of Iranian intellectuals and political activists...
...From 2000 to 2003 he was held in solitary confinement...
...and applying knowledge, but as an end that gives life meaning...
...He is the author of 20 books, including The Tragedy of Democracy in Iran, and has actively campaigned for human rights, chiefly through bylined articles in the reformist press exposing violations of free expression, and by founding Defending the Prisoners' Rights Committee for the defense of prisoners of opinion...
...The main event—lawsuits seeking to create a constitutional "right to research" and thereby unfetter science from meaningful regulation by society—will be coming soon to courtrooms near you...
...the macabre practice of human fetal farming...
...The Illinois bill would have permitted harvestProposition 71 was an audacious power grab that in one stroke tilted the political landscape in Big Biotech's favor...
...This coming cultural and legal clash is being fueled by the growth of "philosophical scientism," an ideology bordering on quasi-religion that perceives science not simply as a potent means for obtaining In fact, the language of the bill was so broad that it didn't prohibit giving birth to a cloned baby...
...Lovemore Madhuku is a Zimbabwean lawyer and Chairman of the National Constitutional Assembly who has been persecuted and jailed for demanding constitutional reform in that country...
...At the same time, legislation to outlaw human cloning had twice passed the House of Representatives in strong bipartisan votes...
...His current book is Consumer's Guide to a Brave New World, published by Encounter Books...
...Every day...
...Then, at the end of the 2003 legislative session, at Governor McGreevy's urging, the bill was returned to the floor and, in a snap vote, passed as originally written...
...So a change of tactics was clearly needed...
...For example, the media generally reported that the initiative merely allowed the use of leftover IVF embryos for stem cell research...
...Illustrating how out of hand things are getting, the bill passed the Illinois Assembly and failed by only one vote in the state senate...
...The president's stem cell policy was never popular, and indeed, many Californians eagerly swallowed the canard that it resulted from Bush's anti-science, religious zealotry...
...Madhuku personally leads many of the demonstrations in support of a new constitution, the one major event which could bring about meaningful change toward real democracy there...
...Choosing California, a state that swings decidedly blue politically, was a brilliant stroke...
...But rather than amend their bill, the authors removed it from consideration until the controversy died down...
...ing of stem cells from "any source," including cloned and natural embryos made for the purpose of research and gestated through the ninth month...
...Had fetal farming not been the goal of the bill, the legislation could have been simply amended, say, to outlaw the implanting of cloned embryos into wombs...
...In the 1990's he formed a secret society called United Iraq is Our Home, to push for the overthrow of Saddam Hussein's government...
...But Proposition 71 did far more than that...
...My emphasis.] The use of "and" in the above sentence opens the door to biotechnologists creating a cloned embryo, implanting it into a willing woman's womb, and having her gestate it through the ninth month, since no law will have been broken unless a cloned baby makes it through birth and into the "newborn stages...
...One commercial depicted a child in a wheelchair, as his distressed mother asserted that Proposition 71 could be her child's only hope for a cure...
...Wesley J. Smith is a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute and a special consultant to the Center for Bioethics and Culture...
...They might be used to test new medicines in place of animals, for the study of genetic disease, as the medium for learning how to engineer genetically enhanced babies, or perhaps even to figure out how to permit the "safe" birth of baby clones...
...Whatever the case, the legal ground is unquestionably being pre-pared for a virtually open-ended cloning license that would allow researchers to conduct experiments far beyond simply extracting stem cells from embryos in Petri dishes...
...It granted researchers a state constitutional right to engage in human somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT)—the same cloning technology used to create Dolly the sheep...
...ROPOSITION 71 was an audacious power grab that in one stroke tilted the political landscape Pin Big Biotech's favor...
...For example, under Proposition 71, maintenance of cloned embryos is WESLEY J S M I T H "initially" to be limited to 12 days...
...1...
...Not a chance...
...Perhaps they simply forgot to outlaw implantation...
...These include failed attempts in Texas, Delaware, and, most recently, in Illinois...
...In this view, scientific endeavors cannot be inhibited other than for extremely compelling reasons—reasons that can only be determined, conveniently, by scientists themselves...
...February 2005 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 25 SCIENCE UNSTEMMED BIG BIOTECH'S AMBITIONS have grown at a breath-taking pace in just a few short years...
...Should that day come, science would be untethered from morality, freeing scientists to pursue even the most bizarre experiments—creating animals with human brains, mixing animal DNA into human embryos, implanting a uterus into a man so he can give birth, just to name a few—all of which have already been foreseen by biotechnology futurists...
...He is one of hundreds of professionals who have been assassinated in the campaign against Iraq's professional class...
...Perhaps it was all a mistake...
...And, while the law makes it a felony to clone a human being, the key to its subversive nature is found in its political definition of the term "human being": As used in this section, "cloning a human being," means the replication of a human individual by cultivating a cell with genetic material [somatic cell nuclear transfer cloning] through the egg, embryo, fetal and newborn stages into a new human individual...
...Voters were given the full movie star treatment...
...One fetal farming proposal could, perhaps, be dismissed as a mistake...
...But that is nothing compared to the permissive research license that Big Biotech has sought, and in one case won, in other states...
...Thus, only scientists are entitled to judge the morality of their experiments—even if tax money is being used, even if the experiments run afoul of views held most dear by the general public...
...While the right to research has been promoted in some professional journals, little has been written about it in the popular media However, the subject was broached last September 24 in the New York Times Magazine...
...He was jailed in May and again in September, this last time with no specified charges...
...For information on the Civil Courage Prize contact: John Train, Chairman, at www.civilcourageprize.org.us...
...With Arnold's imprimatur, a relatively close election turned into a rout...
...But the death blow came when California's 800-pound political gorilla, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, broke his pledge to govern as a strict economic conservative and endorsed one of the biggest corporate welfare schemes in history...
...Raphael Wakenge is the co-founder of the Congolese Justice and Peace Initiative, which works tirelessly to carry out long-term investigations of grave violations of international human rights and humanitarian law in the Democratic Republic of the Congo...
...But Big Biotech's audacious cloning agenda isn't even the half of it...
...Making matters worse, the actual terms of Proposition 71 received only shallow analysis...
...Super celebrity Brad Pitt publicly toured research labs to urge Californians to vote yes...
...But the law goes far beyond embryonic stem cells maintained in Petri dishes...
...Accordingly, many in the scientific and bioethics establishments now proclaim the right to research, an almost unlimited freedom of science supposedly derived from the rights to freedom of thought and expression...
...Perhaps the authors didn't intend to allow the gestation of late-term cloned fetuses...
...In January 2004, New Jersey enacted one of the most radical laws in human history...
...This raises the question: What in the world do researchers want with late stage cloned fetuses...
...Should that day come, Katie, bar the door...
...Only a filibuster in the U.S...
...But several such bills constitute a pattern expressing a clear intent...
...Despite threats, beatings, and jail sentences, he continues to interview and protect victims, author reports and communiques to international human rights organizations, and speak out on local and international radio against human rights abuses...
...And even though its administrators will be doling out hundreds of millions of California's dollars each year to private companies and public academic institutions, their decisions will not be subjected to meaningful oversight by state elected officials and regulators...
...Cloning advocates looked to California's initiative process and saw a Golden State opportunity to buy themselves a tailor-made law that would be so liberal—and so bounteously funded by the taxpayers ($3 billion over ten years)—that their every research dream could come true...
...Arnold Tsunga is a leading human rights lawyer in Zimbabwe who has taken on numerous cases of individuals arrested and abused under the current government...
...It will be controlled by academics, scientists, patient advocacy group representatives, and other biotech insiders—bio-skeptics need not apply...
...Most recently he received a suspended sentence for an unspecified charge...
...Not only are the biological integrity and meaning of human life at stake, but more fundamentally, the next decade may well decide whether science continues to serve society, or instead, comes to dominate it...
...The institute was designed to be a power unto itself...
...And that takes a lot of money...
...ai~firt~es by led Bahbit • Law-re Marina-s ; enic Enemy Ctral • J Shaw aco`m °")ected by Find out what the Washington Prowler has uncovered...
...The current controversies over stem cell research, human cloning, and biotechnology are important both in their own right and as surrogates for the coming cultural and legal struggle over the manner and extent to which our democratic society regulates science...
...In quiet corners of the ivory tower of academia, legal scholars and bioethicists are constructing the intellectual foundation for what they hope will one day become a court-created constitutional "right to research...
...Well, they might be used to grow organs for transplant patients that would not be rejected by the body—an experiment that has already been tried successfully in animals...
...Since cloning advocates could not get their way from the top down, they decided instead to pursue their radical dreams from the bottom up, in the states...
...2004 Posthumous Award Abdul al-Latif aI-Mayah was a political scientist and human rights activist in Iraq killed in early 2004 by eight masked gunmen...
...No issues, other than the Jihad, are more important to the human future...
...See what daily insight from George Neumayr gets quoted by the who's who in Washington and talk radio...
...The late Christopher Reeve appeared in pro-71 ads one week after he died...
...Still, such is the appetite of biotechnology boosters that the measure is already in some ways obsolete...
Vol. 38 • February 2005 • No. 1
