Real Bioethics Means Talking about Science
President Obama’s pledge that his administration will “restore science to its rightful place” is already echoing through several significant policies that undo years of Bush-era antiscientific partisanship. Last week, he lifted the “global gag rule“; today he will direct the EPA to grant California its long-delayed emissions waiver; later this week it’s expected that he will lift restrictions on federal funding of stem cell research.
Susan Wolf, bioethicist and law professor at the University of Minnesota, has an op-ed in today’s Star Tribune arguing that new administration moves on biomedical policy won’t just resolve individual issues, but must “rescue our ability to do bioethics at all.”
She points to the national debate that erupted around the Terri Schiavo case, which ignored the extensive body of bioethical work and court decisions related to end-of-life issues in favor of partisan politics. The element missing from so many bioethical discussions of recent years? Science. New policy isn’t enough, she argues; rather we need to talk “openly and honestly” about issues in biomedicine and science.
Wolf penned an excellent article in 2004 assessing, among other things, the work of Bush’s President’s Council on Bioethics in which she pointed out that the Council shifted away from bioethical approaches focused on the rights of patients and citizens and towards the use of law to “ban, penalize, and enforce”—without addressing the complex scientific and ethical issues involved. In essence, the prevailing brand of conservative bioethics focused less on protecting patients and research subjects and more on generating policy that could potentially punish researchers with state force.
One concrete example of how new policy can help enable science-based bioethical discussions: As explained in CAP’s new report on stem cell research, the National Academies have already created a framework for local governance of research through Embryonic Stem Cell Research Oversight committees. The ESCROs, along with other layers of oversight, like Institutional Review Boards and Institutional Biosafety Committees, are venues where scientists, ethicists, and community members can talk openly and honestly about how science, done ethically, can help people. Lifting the restrictions on federal funding for human embryonic stem cell research will enable discovery to continue with proper oversight that pays attention to the science, rather than arbitrary rules about when cell lines were derived. That approach didn’t turn out to be ethical anyway.
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