BOSTON — With Ron Reagan’s address last night, the Democratic
convention shifted from hokey artifice to downright dishonesty and
flagrant falsehood. The reason for having the late former
president’s son speak was obvious. It had nothing to do with
bipartisan appeal — this Reagan has never been a Republican. The
Democrats are trying to capitalize on sympathy for the Gipper’s
suffering at the hands of Alzheimer’s disease.
That sort of melodrama and emotional manipulation is standard
political fare and would be no more despicable than the kind of
thing both parties do all the time were it not for the dishonesty
that oozed from Reagan’s performance.
To begin, stem cell research offers little promise for treatment
of Alzheimer’s. The chief way in which scientists believe they can
do good with stem cells is in the replacement of corrupted cells in
different parts of the body. Alzheimer’s however, is not a cellular
disease. It is what doctors call a “full-brain” disease.
Alzheimer’s expert Dr. Dennis Selkoe recently told the
President’s Commission on Bioethics:
[T]he disease is so widespread in the nervous system as
compared to Parkinson’s … that I would worry that stem cells
would have that uphill battle [with regard to
Alzheimer’s].
While experts won’t rule out the possibility stem-cell research
can be used for Alzheimer’s, it is widely considered to be not the
most promising application of stem-cell therapy.
BEYOND THE IMPLICIT dishonesty (Ron never mentioned Alzheimer’s in
his speech) was the dishonesty in what the former ballet dancer
actually said. First, Reagan described the process of cloning, but
refused to call it that. In his words:
The nucleus of one of your cells is placed into a donor
egg whose own nucleus has been removed. A bit of chemical or
electrical stimulation will encourage your cell’s nucleus to begin
dividing, creating new cells which will then be placed into a
tissue culture.
The scientific name for this process is Somatic Cell Nuclear
Transfer (SCNT). The Bioethics Commission unanimously stated that
“the initial product” of SCNT is “a living (one-celled) cloned
human embryo.” Reagan gave a speech under the pretenses of
“embryonic stem cell research” when he was really singing the
praises of cloning, which he dared not mention by name — probably
because public support for such research drops precipitously when
it is so called.
Omissions continued to rain down. Saying that SCNT “creat[es]
new cells” is exactly analogous to saying sexual reproduction
creates new cells. Yes, both processes create new cells, and in
both cases, the new cells are embryonic human beings. Which led to
this chestnut:
By the way, no fetal tissue is involved in this
process. No fetuses are created, none destroyed. This all happens
in the laboratory at the cellular level.
On a technical level, he is correct. No “fetal tissue” is
involved because only fetuses have fetal tissue. But the
embryo has been killed or dissected before it could develop into a
fetus, which is what you call an embryo once is gets to about eight
weeks of gestation and has started forming organs.
Or again, dismissing opponents of embryonic stem-cell
research:
They argue that interfering with the development of
even the earliest stage embryo, even one that will never be
implanted in a womb and will never develop into an actual fetus, is
tantamount to murder.
But remember, Ron was talking about creating these embryos for
the sake of experimentation, and so of course they will
never develop into actual fetuses.
And of course, Reagan couldn’t get through the speech without
accusing opponents of bad faith — literally. He at one point
implied that the only well-intentioned reason to oppose his agenda
is “theology”:
But it does not follow that the theology of a few
should be allowed to forestall the health and well-being of the
many.
Again, he missed the nuances of the matter. Specifically, Reagan
called on the government to use tax dollars in order to create
human clones, and then experiment on and retard the development of
these clones at an early stage so that these clones can be “your
own personal biological repair kit” rather than, say, your little
brother.
