Stem Cell Speech?

[Bill Stewart]

>Date: Sun, 12 Aug 2001 01:10:52 -0400 (EDT)
>From: Charles Platt <cp at panix.com>
>To: Matthew Gaylor <freematt at coil.com>
>Subject: stem cell speech
>
>Matt, I am baffled that I have not read, anywhere, a suggestion from
>anyone that George Bush has no constitutional right to set science policy.
>His speech on stem cell research included a statement that he had decided
>to proceed cautiously. How does he have the right to make such a decision?

As Tim May pointed out, this isn't an issue of whether to ban the research,
it's an issue of whether to provide Federal Funding to pay for the research.

But the Feds are setting policy about privately-funded human cloning research,
and probably could set policy about embryonic stem cell research if they
wanted to.  The commerce clause is pretty much infinitely extensible,
or they could argue it's Protecting The General Welfare of US homo sapiens,
though of course the real issue is "Mah constituents think it's creepy and
keep rantin' at me about how Ah'd better do something, so of course Ah'll
vote for your bill."

The Equal Protection clause would even work, at least until somebody takes
it to the Supremes and says that Roe vs. Wade bans
Special Rights for Early Americans.

You could even stretch the DMCA far enough to cover it - either the
embryo or its parents owns copyright on the DNA, and there are technical
methods used to protect copying (so the cells only turn into the
kinds of body parts they're supposed to), and developing a mechanism
to evade that protection is a violation of the DMCA even if the
individual copyright owners participating in the research don't mind
having their DNA copied.

On a more serious note, I hope that any laws and policies they write
banning cloning are narrowly limited.  Lots of people get upset about
cloning *entire* humans, creating a new human being who's a pseudo-twin
of the original one, but that's much different from cloning body parts,
such as creating a clone of your liver or kidneys to replace the damaged ones.
A ban on the latter would be a real tragedy.