Instead, what we see is a parade of efforts to pay for these experiments
from the public purse. At the federal level, there is the
Castle-DeGette-Specter bill that would open the U.S. Treasury to the
financing of more embryonic stem cell lines. Among the states,
California voters have authorized $3 billion in bonds over 10 years to
pay for embryo destruction and cloning. The Maryland legislature has
passed a bill that will devote $15 million to embryo stem cell funding
in its first year. New Jersey's embryonic stem cell advocates passed a
law last December to spend $270 million on bricks-and-mortar for such
research, and this year they plan to come back for a similar amount for
related work.
One stock analyst described for private investors the hazards of
investing their own money in these projects. Writing at the online
service About: Stocks, analyst Ken Little said, "You should acknowledge
this technology may be years from producing commercial products. This
is not cutting edge, this is bleeding edge." No one knows, he
concludes, "when or if" the day will come when such research leads to
"miracle cures."
In the meantime, adult stem cell research and therapies (there are no
human therapies available today based on embryonic stem cells, nor even
any animal trials involving such therapies) are racing ahead and
attracting both private and, in a few cases, some public funding. More
than 70 human conditions have been treated using adult stem cell-based
approaches, with word just this week from the United Kingdom that
researchers there have been able to grow replacement heart valves in the
laboratory. Animal trials are next, and if they succeed, these fully
human, manufactured valves could be ready for patients in three to five
years.
History, closely observed, reminds us how the spirit of entrepreneurship
really thrives. If biomedical research is the frontier of science in
the 21st century, heavier-than-air, powered flight was the frontier in
the 20th century. Scarcely two decades before the Wright Brothers flew
at Kitty Hawk, eminent physicists were widely quoted as saying that
sustained flight would never happen. The President of the Royal Society
of London, Lord Kelvin, said in 1885, "Heavier-than-air flying machines
are impossible."
Twenty-five years later the U.S. government bought its first airplane
from the Wright Brothers. Orville and Wilbur, from Dayton, Ohio,
designed and built their machine using the profits from their bicycle
shop. As one historian noted, "If they needed a part they made it. If
they didn't have the tools to make the part, they made the tools." The
brothers spent all of six-and-a-half years and $1,000 of their own money
on the signature invention of the 20th century.
The story of the Wright Brothers is the story of America - and something
more. It is the story of genius, applied with diligence, pursued with
love. Neither brother had so much as a high school diploma. Like the
creative minds that brought us today's powerful personal computers, the
skills they possessed and the tasks God had given them to do transcended
the need for formal education.
Geniuses like these both baffle and amaze us. Like ethics in science,
however, they are absolutely essential. Governments cannot produce such
results. Governments cannot make genius. In the case of embryonic stem
cells, government's headlong rush to ignore ethical limits and pick and
choose the "winners" will only prove the point once again. If cures are
to be found, only genius will find them and only ethical pathways will
take us to them.