Misguided Stem Cell Legal Battle Comes to an End
SOURCE: Flickr/Pacific Northwest Regional Laboratory
Opponents of “frivolous” lawsuits should be joining with the biology community in celebrating the dismissal of a case that should never have gone as far as it did. On Wednesday District Court Judge Royce Lamberth reversed his earlier decision granting a preliminary injunction that stopped federal funding for embryonic stem cell research. A three-judge panel not known for its rabid liberalism found that Lamberth erred in concluding that the plaintiffs were likely to win on the merits.
The plaintiff’s assertions were implausible on substance and process. On substance, there is no “zero sum game” for funding stem cell research. Regardless of the source of the cells, each proposal is reviewed by the National Institutes of Health on its merits. On process, executive branch agencies are normally given the benefit of the doubt by the courts in interpreting congressional intent, and three administrations including that of President George W. Bush had accepted the proposition that funding of research on lines derived from embryonic stem cells did not violate a 1996 rule preventing the NIH from funding embryo destruction.
Stepping back from this legal meandering, the larger importance of this incident lies in the fact that only research on biology has been subject to such a challenge. Even at the fever pitch of our culture wars, no advocates have thought to bring suit against the federal government for funding, say, geological studies that confirmed that the earth is more than 6,000 years old. Indeed, from the infamous Scopes “monkey” trial to present-day creationism lawsuits, biology (in particular, the teaching of evolution) has been the wedge into literal readings of the Biblical period of creation. The fact is that modern biology is threatening in ways that the physical sciences are not, a challenge for a country that is both founded on the promise of science and needs science to sustain its leadership role in the 21st century.
This tension between the growing power of biology and the cultural conservative impulse to hang onto what they consider traditional values is one I elaborate in a new book, The Body Politic: The Battle Over Science in America, which will appear this fall. It’s one that has subsided for the moment but which we can be assured will reappear in many forms, in and out of the courtroom.
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