An interesting article on why we shouldn't get too smug and self-righteous about our supposed liberal and free Western society. The disease of fundamentalist religion still manifests symptoms in so-called "free" West:
BODY AND MIND: Religious repression - western style: APPLIANCE OF SCIENCE: The row over embryonic stem cell research shows that plenty of minds in the 'secular' west are still happy to suppress science, warns Thomas Barlow
Financial Times; Dec 8, 2001
By THOMAS BARLOWIn south-east Asia, betweenthe borders of Burmaand Laos, sits a small country called Bejoking. Earlier this year, a group of minority Jains seized power there, and banned the killing of mosquitoes on moral grounds - despite the fact that the region suffers from one of the highest rates of malaria in the world.
Almost simultaneously, in the Central American state of Farce, where the ruling party is primarily constituted of Jehovah's Witnesses, blood transfusions have been forbidden, as they are considered morally obscene.
Traffic-accident mortality is now at the highest rate in the Latin world, and patients who want major elective surgery must leave the country.
Ridiculous? Absolutely. And for that reason, these fictions are perhaps perfect analogies for ageing western societies that have chosen, largely on parochial religious grounds, to ban or impede the use of embryos for research into regenerative medicine.
I am sure you know the score: that most European countries, for instance, have banned the use of embryos for stem cell research, and are fussing over researchers who try importing embryonic stem cells from elsewhere.
In Spain, for example, a country with a long and distinguished history of suppressing free inquiry, the health ministry recently ordered diabetes expert Bernat Soria, head of the Bioengineering Institute at Miguel Hernandez University in Alicante, to halt his work, after it was discovered he had obtained embryonic stem cells from Israel.
And in Germany, Oliver Brustle, a neuroscientist at the University of Bonn Medical Centre, whose remarkable work has included repairing injured nervous systems in rats using rat embryonic stem cells, has received death threats after applying for funding to work towards the same end for humans - again, with imported human embryonic stem cells.
Add to this the frenzy of moral fervour in the US. Last month, scientists from the biotechnology company, Advanced Cell Technology, reported their first, crude attempts to clone human cells. Essentially, they took DNA from human skin, placed it inside human eggs from which the chromosomes had been removed, and coaxed the resulting cells to divide a couple of times. The experiment was not especially successful. But it is seen as a possible first step towards tissue regeneration without the problems of immune system rejection.
In the US, though, it looks as though this avenue of inquiry is to be closed. In the country with the world's highest incidence of degenerative disease, the House of Representatives has passed a bill outlawing the cloning of human cells for medical purposes.
How strange to think, if the US Senate ratifies the bill in the new year, that this same piece of work could earn a person 10 years in jail and a Dollars 1m fine.
Naturally, I don't mean to imply in all this that specific western politicians might have succumbed to their own brand of morally self-righteous fanaticism. (I am sure that we all have a bit of the Taliban within us.) But it is interesting that western societies, moodily preoccupied with technology, have begun to show themselves so strangely comfortable with the idea of impeding its march.
Switzerland has held a national referendum on the possibility of banning all transgenic research. New Zealand has placed its scientific community on notice while a royal commission assesses whether the country should become "genetic-engineering-free". And now all this soul searching about a bunch of cells.
When countries in the past have banned technology - not for safety reasons but for questionable moral reasons - it has not always turned out for the best.
China, from the 12th to the early 15th century, was the greatest maritime power in the world. In the early 15th century, however, official shipbuilding was brought to a halt and overseas expeditions were ended by official decree. Seafaring vessels with more than two masts were banned outright.
Needless to say, at about the same time, the Celestial Empire began its decline into isolation and cultural stagnation.
There are lessons, too, in the demise of firearms technology in 17th century Japan. By 1600, the Japanese were producing more and better guns than probably any other country. Fear of the weapons' equalising influence, however, prompted successive Samurai governments to curtail the industry, which declined through the early 17th century, thereafter remaining insignificant for two centuries.
Today, one might look at stories such as these and wonder about the global future of cell therapy. In a trivial sense, the signs are already pointing in particular directions.
In July, for example, Roger Pederson, a well-known cell biologist from the University of California, San Francisco, announced that he was leaving the US, frustrated with the impediments to stem cell research, and was taking up a position at Cambridge in the UK, where such research is publicly supported.
Then, in August, Jim Clark, co-founder of Netscape Communications, announced that he had retracted Dollars 60m from Dollars 150m donated to Stanford University for an inter-disciplinary research centre. This was his protest against the Bush administration's decision to restrict embryonic stem cell research. Writing in The New York Times, he said the US "risks being thrown into a dark age of medical research".
But the really interesting question is not one of mere competitiveness, or even of lives not saved. So long as someone somewhere carries the flame, the practical concern is not a matter of opportunity lost so much as delayed. (If a breakthrough in embryonic stem cell research occurs in the UK, Japan, Israel, or Australia, one presumes many other countries may be persuaded to change their tune.)
What is most striking is simply the bare fact of intellectual repression. How comforting it has been in recent months to promulgate the myth that the west is secular and open-minded. In plenty of influential minds, however, there is clearly still a hankering for religious and moral repression.
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