New Jersey recently announced its intention to become a stem-cell-friendly state. It will be subsidizing this groundbreaking research into how to use people's existing cells to make batches of pliable new ones, from which would be made new tissue in order to treat disease.
New Jersey's decision is in marked contrast to the elimination of most federal funding for such research and the occasional rumblings from the feds about banning all stem cell research not to mention banning efforts to clone whole human beings. The feds have talked about banning stem and clone research not only domestically but overseas, through the U.N. Scientific and ethical differences between stem cell (or therapeutic cloning) research and bringing about the birth of a cloned baby (reproductive cloning) are spelled out in other articles on this site, such as this one.
New Jersey: State of the Future?
New Jersey has been the butt of jokes for decades, but the case for New Jersey as the State of the Future may be getting stronger (and not, for the most part, due to government subsidies):
- It's home to innovative chemical companies.
- It also boasts some of the largest pharmaceutical manufacturers.
- Joel Garreau's book Edge City argues convincingly that much-decried "urban sprawl," for which Jersey is also famous, is really the appropriate dynamic, mixed-use environment for twenty-first-century culture, blending the convenience of the suburbs and downtown.
- Being less dense, it's less likely to be targeted for attack by terrorists than a big city like nearby New York.
- And one day, if current trends hold, it may be the tolerant home to healthy, long-lived beneficiaries of stem cell research.
There has been talk about how firms might move overseas if the U.S. began outlawing biotech, but perhaps they'll simply move to New Jersey for the time being.
Focus on the Fiscal
Despite unconservative, big-spending Bush's plans for a moonbase and a Mars mission, science often advances not in monolithic, spectacular ways but in quiet, piecemeal ways, and so it will probably be with biotech. While we're having "national greatness" thrust upon us in the form of big projects on other worlds, New Jersey may become the place where the future really begins. But I would recommend that they do so quietly, without government subsidies, and without erecting costly monuments over it (though I did once visit a beautiful, modest, fairly small monument to rationalist and freedom-lover Tom Paine in New Jersey, on the outskirts of Summit, so monuments aren't always bad).
States going their own way allows for more experimentation than letting the feds call all the shots but better yet, let corporations and individuals make science funding decisions and keep government (at any level) out of it altogether. Then we can avoid having to engage in political battles over which projects are appropriate and which planets to probe. If some projects are so costly that they require more funding than any one entity in the private sector can afford, nothing's stopping multiple entities, from Boeing to RadioShack, banding together to raise a bigger pot (some companies have more money than entire developing nations these days). All the NASA, NIH, etc. money came out of the same private sector via taxes anyway; it just gets spent in bigger, dumber, more visible, less efficient ways once it's in government hands.
Conservatives occasionally recognize that fact and sometimes even act accordingly. However, as long as the core of their philosophy is not rational fiscal analysis but instead a sort of "toughness" the well-meaning but vague psychological/aesthetic/cultural impulse to stand strong against hippies, foreign foes, atheists, or Martians they'll be led into economically wasteful and scientifically foolish endeavors about as easily as any other breed of (de facto) socialists.
If conservatives in government want to stay true to their stated limited-government principles, they can save money and avoid some ugly fights by simply getting out of the science biz, neither funding nor banning things. Some of my colleagues might not agree with that anarchist prescription, but it would certainly put an end to a lot of tug-of-wars over where to devote public resources and which activities to approve.
Biotech Balance
Both left-wing and right-wing critics of biotech sometimes accuse biotech-boosters (like me) of exaggerating its potential benefits. Boosters accuse the critics of exaggerating the risks. If there is that much disagreement, why not simply leave it to the private sector and individual choice, the way we do most investment decisions (assuming for the moment that one does not think, as some pro-life forces argue, that all stem cell manipulation is literally mass murder, since each newly-made cell can be considered a zygote)? That, combined with the threat to arrest or sue biotech experimenters who do demonstrable harm (killing other people's crops, unleashing marauding human-alligator hybrids, or whatever other doom the critics may imagine) ought to be sufficient incentive to innovate without doing stupid, reckless, unethical things. Private companies tend to make helpful products such as medicine and fertilizer, but generally it takes a government to force resources into dangerous projects of dubious value such as atomic bombs or armies of mutant alligator men.
Want to keep science on the right track? Just stop government funding of all big science projects and let a thousand New Jerseys bloom instead.
Todd Seavey, editor of HealthFactsAndFears, recently weighed in on a related Spiked-Online debate over how the British make science and risk decisions.
