David Starr Jordan, the first president of Stanford University,
was a “biological elitist,” writes historian Kevin Starr in
Americans and the California Dream. Jordan promoted a cult
of the Strong. He did not want the “eugenically inferior” to
populate America.
He thought that the “survival of the unfittest is the primal
cause of the downfall of nations.” He worried about “those whose
descendants are likely through incompetence and vice to be a
permanent burden on our social or political order.” “Sons and
daughters of the Western pioneers, yours is the best blood in the
realm,” he told Stanford students. “It is blood which tells.”
Now for Stanford it is stem cells from cloned embryos which
tell. Jordan’s pursuit of a superior race of humans unblemished by
bad blood continues at the school. Stanford announced last week
that “it will establish a new Institute for Cancer/Stem Cell
Biology and Medicine,” an effort to “develop a new series of
embryonic stem cell lines that will serve as models for a wide
range of genetically related diseases.”
Weakness is so intolerable to the Stanford ethos that the school
is willing to clone human embryos for experimentation in order to
eradicate it. But Stanford officials, lacking the rhetorical
chutzpah of their founding president, conceal their intentions in
medical cant.
Stanford’s Office of Communication and Public Affairs has
produced a “Q&A” press release to obscure the school’s
clone-and-kill-for-research plans. The press release emphasizes
that “Stanford is opposed to human cloning for reproductive
purposes” in the hopes that the public will assume Stanford is
opposed to human cloning for any purposes. But it is not. Stanford
supports human cloning for research purposes, which only differs
from reproductive cloning in that the clone is killed. And come on,
how long before Stanford officials endorse reproductive cloning? If
a disease-free existence justifies immoral means — which is the
argument underlying research cloning — it is only a matter of time
before the modern mind consents to reproductive cloning for the
production of disease-free children.
But for now the public must be snookered. Stanford officials
can’t say, “We need more effective guinea pigs for our research. We
therefore intend to clone human embryos and then kill them for
their useful parts.” It sounds better to say, as they do in their
press release, that Stanford scientists are considering a method
which “involves inserting the nucleus isolated from an adult cell
into an unfertilized egg that has had its nucleus removed.”
Stanford officials lament that “confusion, especially among the lay
public, arises when this is referred to as ‘human embryonic
cloning.’”
No, let it be known to the lay public that this is merely
“nuclear transplantation (or transferal) to produce human
pluripotent stem cell lines.” And if the lay public should persist
in seeing it as cloning, let it also be known to them that “several
different national science and medical institutions (including the
National Academy of Sciences) as well as President Bush’s own
bioethics review panel, have determined that ‘human embryonic
cloning’ is an inaccurate and misleading term for this
research…This research is endorsed by these organizations as
a necessary step in the development of novel new therapies for
cancer, diabetes, Parkinson’s disease and others.”
How could the lay public have ever concluded that embryonic stem
cell lines come from embryos? If only they took their definitions
of reality from scientific panels, they would put away such
childish notions. The San Francisco Chronicle has been
misled, too, apparently. In an editorial endorsing Stanford’s
plans, the Chronicle refers to the “growing embryo” as the
subject of research, and calls the process a “form of cloning.”
Someone at Stanford’s PR shop must call the Chronicle
posthaste and tell its editors to speak of the research only as
“nuclear transplantation.”
But why does Stanford feel the need to hide behind
“bioethicists” who aren’t ethical when it could stand proudly with
its first visionary, David Starr Jordan? Stanford’s cloning project
is just the most advanced stage in his brutal evolutionary
thought.
