Fight Aging!

Scientists - the people who know the most about what they are doing, and are therefore the best qualified to make choices - should decide on whether and how to persue stem cell research:

With presidential contender Senator John Kerry set to deliver a major speech today on stem cell research, the readers of Bio-IT World have also weighed in on the topic: 82 percent of respondents to a recent Bio-IT World poll say scientists should play the primary the major role in determining policy around the use of stems cell issues.

I think that this is an important point that gets glossed over in most discussions of politics. Why do we let politicians - who rarely know enough or even bother to find out the facts about the fields they interfere in - make important decisions? In a sensible, decentralized society, the people who know the most about any given subject would be making local decisions on how to proceed. This seems far better to me.

On a related topic, I was pointed to a good article on embryonic stem cell research, blastocysts, minds and personhood today. It's a sensible expression of common sense and well worth reading:

I am not a doctor. I am not a scientist. But like Ponnuru, I enjoy philosophy and know that it depends upon terminological clarity. So let me state my position -- not necessarily that of everyone who defends ESC -- very clearly: a microscopic ball of undifferentiated cells is not a person.

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My criteria for personhood would at the very least, though, entail that an entity have a mind. There is a reason, after all, that we think someone who loses an arm is still a person while someone who loses a head ceases to be one, and it's not just the fact that it's much harder to keep someone's heart and lungs pumping when he loses his head. It's that his mind -- which is what made him a person rather than just a big lump of flesh and blood -- is gone. You might hear people say, "He lost his leg, but thank goodness he survived!" I submit that you will never hear even the most ardent pro-lifer say, "His head was destroyed, but thank goodness he survived!" (not even in an era in which a headless body could be kept "alive" indefinitely on machines).

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If minds are important, then there is an important and very real moral gulf between a walking, talking human being and a microscopic, mindless, nervous-system-less, undifferentiated ball of a few dozen cells. An argument could be made, using my premises, that a sufficiently developed fetus, with nerves and an incipient brain and the ability to feel pain, is a person and deserves protection -- but that is not the state of affairs with a newly-fertilized egg cell, or a blastocyst in the crucial early days, which is precisely when ESC researchers are interested in them. Since it is precisely undifferentiated cells that scientists want to use, there is no plausible slippery-slope danger of scientists saying "the next logical step is to carve up five-month-old fetuses, and then nine-year-old children" -- it is, by definition, those as yet undifferentiated cells that scientists are after for ESC research purposes.