In the embryonic stem cell research ethics debate, I come out on the “pro” side. Nonetheless, a New York Times article this morning shows clearly how thoroughly and unavoidably biased scientists and researchers in the field are, leading to the conclusion that the decision whether stem cell research is ethical or not, and whether, or to what extent, it should be permitted, cannot be left to them.

The article, by Amy Harmon, begins,

“Rushing to work at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center one recent morning, Jason Spence, 33, grabbed a moment during breakfast to type “stem cells” into Google and click for the last 24 hours of news. It is a routine he has performed daily in the six weeks since a Federal District Court ruling put the future of his research in jeopardy. “It’s always at the front of my brain when I wake up,” said Dr. Spence, who has spent four years training to turn stem cells derived from human embryos into pancreatic tissue in the hope of helping diabetes patients. “You have this career plan to do all of this research, and the thought that they could just shut it off is pretty nerve-racking.”

Spence is one of an estimated 1,300 researchers, technicians and scientists supported by grants of over 200 million dollars supporting hundreds of projects. Meanwhile, the ethics issue in stem cell research is not one that can be easily solved by utilitarian balancing, if it is absolutist principles that are really at stake.

Embryonic stem cells have great potential to cure many diseases (such as Parkinson’s Disease) because they can become any kind of tissue in the human body, but as the name suggests, they must come from living human embryos. The Times article, reflecting its own bias, adds that “many Americans believe [the embryos are] the equivalent of a life.” A fairer way to put it is that living embryos are a form of human life; the question is determining how human, and how alive.

Almost no one is unbiased enough to decide whether destroying human embryos to seek cures that may save millions is the right thing to do. Society is pretty unanimous in agreeing that snatching homeless people and alcoholic vagrants off the streets to perform fatal but enlightening experiments on them for the same goal would be monstrous. Ditto for killing newborns, created by a horde of well-paid,  artificially-inseminated Octomoms. Aborting the early-term pregnancies of needy single mothers to get unwanted embryos for research sounds a little more palatable, or should. If there is really nothing wrong about abortion, as NARAL argues, and embryos are not human lives, then this procedure should raise no more ethical alarms than a haircut.

The far end of the pro-abortion group advocates the haircut approach, and has convinced itself that this is ethically sound; but they believe that uncontrolled access to abortion is the prime directive, so they will adopt a philosophical view that makes this possible. Many of those who admit no difference between an early term embryo and the newborn seek consistency with religious dogma, which is high on their priority list…higher, for example, than allowing a way out of misery for a rape victim. And they know a slippery slope when they see one. Indeed, the stem cell issue is all slippery slopes, in every direction.  Stem cell research today, euthanasia tomorrow. Or protecting abandoned embryos this week, locking up pregnant woman to prevent them from having abortions next year. The unpleasant fact is that nobody is unbiased, even bioethicists, whose job is to be objective and analytical. Bioethicists are human beings. They can have daughters with unwanted pregnancies; they can have children with Muscular Dystrophy; they can be revolted by photos of “partial abortions.”

Under guidelines authorized by both the Bush and Obama administrations, destroying embryos to acquire stem cells cannot be federally financed. But the government can support subsequent research on the cell lines created by that process.

Two scientists filed a lawsuit in 2009, arguing that the distinction is a false and unethical one, violating federal law.They also argued that the accommodation for embryonic stem cell research takes limited government resources from research on other types of stem cells, which some scientists  view as ethically and scientifically superior. In August, Chief Judge Royce C. Lamberth of Federal District Court for the District of Columbia ruled that the Obama administration’s policy violates a law barring federal financing for “research in which a human embryo or embryos are destroyed, discarded or knowingly subjected to risk of injury or death,” and issued an injunction blocking federal money for the research.

So now the matter is probably going to be resolved in the U.S. Supreme Court. Scientists, the Times report, object to that: “They bristle at the intrusion of judges and politicians into decisions usually addressed by the peer review process, in which experts in a field comment on the merit of an idea and the best get financed.” The same Times article however, makes it clear that the scientists have a crippling conflict of interest: their livelihood, work, careers and income depend on deciding that embryonic stem cells are not human lives.

Judges are not the best arbiters of matters of science, philosophy and the essence of human life, and yes, they have biases too, political and otherwise. At least, however, what they decide about the humanity of embryonic stem cells won’t take money out of their bank accounts, or put it there. That makes them more likely to reach an ethical solution to this difficult but vital controversy than the scientists and researchers who understand it best.