Week of April 15, 2002
[Note: Some now-dead links have been removed from archived items.]

BOOKS UPDATE: If you ordered a signed copy of TFAIE via PayPal by noon today (Wednesday), your book is on its way. If you'd like to order a copy, click the cover to the left. Please be sure to note to whom you want it signed. (PayPal provides a space for comments; use it!) I also accept mail orders. Email me for the address. Thanks for all the interest. [Posted 4/17.]

CALLING SENATORS: Medical chemist and blogger Derek Lowe tells readers to call their senators' offices to oppose the Brownback bill to criminalize cell cloning. (Scroll down to Sunday.) And he reports on his own experience:

My calls to the offices of my state's Senators told me that they've already received a good amount of feedback. There was no down time - as soon as I mentioned "S. 1899" the staffers I spoke with were asking which side of the cloning issue I was advocating.

My use of the phrase "Much as I hate to find myself on the same side of an issue as Tom Daschle..." must have given them a chuckle.

Information on how to contact your senator is here. It's also good to contact the offices of senators expected to be swing votes. The vote counts differ depending on which side is speaking, but one list (in support of the ban) is here (via reader Eric Barnhill). As one Washington vet told me, lawmakers' aides have a tendency to tell lobbyists what they want to hear. A reader's report on calling Senator Allard's office, where he was told that the senator supports bans on reproductive cloning but not "cell cloning," suggests that may go for constituents as well. (Allard is co-sponsoring the bill to make cell cloning a crime.)

People who sign the Franklin Society petition will get email updates from me as the process proceeds. [Posted 4/17.]

USED BOOKS: Sylvia Nasar, author of A Beautiful Mind, defends Amazon's used book policy in today's NYT:

I drive a used car, live in a "used" house and own a lot of used economics books. As far as I know, purveyors of new cars, houses and textbooks are doing fine. Might Amazon's latest innovation may be good for everyone, including authors?

Making it easier to buy and sell used books is obviously great for readers, especially those with more time than money to spare. Buyers can now choose between owning a book, owning and reselling, or buying a slightly worn copy. And, unlike teenagers who download music from the Web or professors who photocopy entire textbooks, readers who resell are not breaking any laws.

The economics of used-goods sales is actually quite complicated. Whether second-hand markets increase or decrease the price of new goods depends on all sorts of specifics, including how durable the good is and how patient the buyers are. The textbook market, in which students need a specific book at a specific time, isn't an exact model for the used book market more generally. But authors who want to be read—and most real authors do—can only benefit from a market for second-hand books, especially since, as Hugh Hewitt pointed out when I was on his radio show last week, some of us have out-of-print books we'd still like to get to new readers. [Posted 4/17.]

END STATES: Chapman University law professor Tom W. Bell, whom some readers may know from his many writings on technology policy, writes:

You write:

"Ramesh...thinks it's absurd not to take a teleological view, declaring something a person because, given enough time and the right circumstances it could become one. I think it's equally absurd to say that undifferentiated cells are people."

I find your counter-argument wholly adequate. As I once said in launching my side of a public debate about abortion, "Not every human is a person. Not every person is a human." See brain dead humans and (still hypothetical) artificial intelligences, respectively. It's easy to understand why some conservatives make the category mistake of equating humans to persons, but harder to excuse it.

In the interest of forwarding your side of the debate, however, allow me to offer yet another response to the telelogical argument. Most people who take the view that end-states determine current moral status should, logically, conclude that no person has rights. Why so? Because those same anti-abortionists typically also think that every person must eventually die. And, of course, dead people have no rights.

[Posted 4/17.]

MORE BLOGS ON CELL CLONING: Gary Farber weighs in, as does Tom Perry of Isntapundit.

Paul Orwin points me to his December archives, noting that the subject was "one of the things that got me started blogging." (Unfortunately back then he hadn't yet discovered how to deal with paragraph breaks.) In addition, he points to this response to a "LARGE discussion on Rand Simberg's site." (As usual with Blogger users, you have to scroll down the archives page to find the item.)

Paul listened to the NPR exchange between Leon Kass and Greg Stock and calls it "pretty infuriating." Kass, he says, "essentially is arguing that we shouldn't try to outlive the 80 years or so that 'Nature' has alloted us. Greg Stock did a pretty good job of keeping him at bay, but is a bit too nice, I think."

ITEM LINKS: Some bloggers complain that I don't have a "permanent link" feature on this roll-your-own-HTML site. I understand the problem, but that's not strictly speaking true. Every item includes an anchor tag, which is visible by looking at the source code version of the page. I do eventually move items, a week at a time, to archive pages, so a link to this page doesn't work forever. (It's not too hard to figure out the archive pages' naming structure.) But people whose "permanent links" require readers to scroll down pages in search of specific items shouldn't be complaining. There are advantages and disadvantages to both structures. A link to this page with an anchor tag will be good for two to three weeks. [Posted 4/17.]

TEST TUBE CONSTITUENTS: Reader Chris Huttman makes a generational point that hadn't occured to me:

I'm not sure how accurate my speech was, but I was able to defeat a proposed platform plank at the Georgia Young Democrats annual convention that read something like "we support efforts to ban cloning..." with a floor speech that said, "This categorization is so overbroad that it could probably have been used to ban test-tube babies 30 years ago. If you're a test tube baby, or if any of your friends are, please oppose this amendment."

Once again, I'm not sure how accurate this phrase is, but it worked like a charm on the other delegates. If the anti-cloning faction are going to resort to such primordial rhetoric, the anti-anti-cloning faction needs to also, regardless of the technical accuracy. Anyway, the public can't handle and isn't interested in a technical debate anyway—if you're arguing the details, you've already lost.

This could be the first of a series of major slipups for Bush and Rove. The time to placate the social conservative wing of the Republican Party was 1994 and to a lesser extent 2000, but not now and definitely not in 2004. Try as the Nancy Pelosis might to destroy the Democrat Party from within with the remnants of socialism and identity politics, if a strong moderate/conservative Democrat emerges in the next few years, I would say the GOP could be in major trouble. There are so many conservatives and even libertarian young people I know who, on paper, should be Republicans, but can't stand the social conservative authoritarians. Besides, if you're a conservative Democrat, everyone needs your "swing" vote.

Sure, they (the anti-Republican conservative/libertarian young folk) don't like taxes either, but since we've already got those, and they really aren't going away, the only authoritarianism they think is worth fighting against (as far as future encroachment of their own lives go) is that on the social right. Of course, leftist authoritarianism is much scarier, but it's also simply perceived as an old joke that won't die.

Let me go on the record as being absolutely against resorting to technical inaccuracy to make a case for scientific freedom (or anything else). It is possible to be simple, accurate, and emotionally persuasive at the same time. Coming up with the right phrasing may take more work, but neither freedom nor science is served by deliberate falsehood. That said, there's an obvious connection between yesterday's apocalyptic fears of test tube babies and today's apocalyptic fears of human cloning (whether for cell research or childbirth). I'm also dubious about Chris's optimistic political scenario, since those Old Democrat interest groups are pretty deeply entrenched.

But Chris makes a stunningly obvious point and important that I knew intellectually but had never processed: The test tube babies who were supposed to deliver us to Brave New World are old enough to be voters, and there are going to be more of them every day. If they pay any attention to today's rhetoric, these former test tube babies will start to notice that the Bush administration and its anti-cloning allies on the right and left don't really approve of their existence. (People like Leon Kass grudgingly say they've changed their minds and now accept in vitro fertilization, mostly because it's a done deal.) There is nothing like an attack on one's identity to mobilize a constituency, even against its economc interest. And there's no greater attack on identity than saying the world would be better if this group of voters had never been conceived.

We have lots of test tube babies. But we don't have Brave New World. We don't have Brave New World because we have no one in charge of allocating genetic rights, no central controller telling us who can have children and how. Instead, we have perfectly normal people who grew up within the robust, adaptable institution of the family—an institution now under attack, oddly enough, from conservatives who fear "designer babies" more than they fear government control over family life. [Posted 4/16.]

EMBRYO POLITICS: Over on The Corner, Ramesh Ponnuru complains that libertarian bloggers—he avoids links, but I'm presumably the main offender—are criticizing the administration's campaign to make (to use Charlie Murtaugh's precise term) embryo cloning a federal crime. Ramesh, who believes a fertilized egg is a person, seems to think that the term "research cloning" was coined on behalf of traditional conservative pro-lifers like him. I doubt it. That sort of stigmatizing of research comes out of the (fully secular) Kass/Kristol/Cohen/Fukuyama anti-biotech agenda. That agenda has nothing to do with defending embryos in petri dishes from what Ramesh sees as murder. If you wanted to do that, you'd either just use "cloning" or "embryo cloning." You wouldn't go out of your way to make scientists look evil.

Ramesh thinks it's misleading to use a modifier on "cloning," since scientifically the goal of the procedure doesn't matter. True enough, but that assumes the audience has some clue what you're talking about. Unlike the NR crowd, most people who fear "cloning" don't give two hoots about the lives of fertilized eggs, in or out of petri dishes. We should be so lucky to have the debate conducted on that level. Instead, the public is still getting its mind around the idea that cloned babies would be real human beings, born as infants, not photocopies of adults or soulless automaton.

Among those who've gotten past that Star Wars definition, Leon Kass's "wisdom of repugnance," a.k.a. "the yuck factor," tends to frame the discussion. Those modified terms—therapeutic cloning, cell cloning, embryo cloning, take your pick—are trying to explain that the technique involved is about cells in petri dishes, not photocopies of Hitler or Arnold Schwarzenegger. The language isn't perfect, but neither is it incorrect. It's designed to clarify, not to mislead.

If we wanted to be scientifically precise, we'd say the administration wants to make somatic nuclear cell transfer a crime punishable by 10 years in prison. But people would think that had something to do with bombs and Three Mile Island.

Ramesh is also frustrated that people like me don't argue the case that a blastocyst is not a person every time we discuss nucleus transplantation. He thinks it's absurd not to take a teleological view, declaring something a person because, given enough time and the right circumstances it could become one. I think it's equally absurd to say that undifferentiated cells are people. Talking louder and slower isn't going to convince either of us to change our minds. For those who didn't wear out all their patience with the subject in dorm bull sessions, the exchange between Ron Bailey and Patrick Lee and Robert George does a good job of presenting both sides. [Posted 4/16.]

CORRECTION: The New America Foundation's forum, "Cloning, Stem Cells and What Comes Next," is Tuesday, not today. [Posted 4/15.]

WORD CHOICE: Former Gore speechwriter Dan Pink, author of Free Agent Nation, comments on the administration's consistent use of "research cloning" to describe what others call "therapeutic cloning":

Take it from someone who's seen the cynical center of presidential speechwriting: that phrase was tested in either a focus group or a poll. There's no way it came from the pen of a speechwriter. It came from a memo from some political consultant or pollster. Seriously, I'd wager a small fortune on that. The spinmeisters are trying to change the direction of the semantic arrow. Therapeutic cloning points to the patients—often desperately ill patients in need of help. Research cloning points to the scientists—that is, cold-blooded men in white coats who are conducting frivolous experiments on helpless embryos for their own enjoyment. Despicable. Maybe Dick Morris is advising Bush.

Dan on political identities: If a conservative is a liberal who's been mugged, a libertarian is a liberal who's become a free agent. His book is about to come out in paperback. I recommend it to anyone interested in the evolving world of work. [Posted 4/15.]

MORE CLONING POSTS: Harvard Crimson writer Alex Rubalcava takes up the issue on his blog here, here, and here.

Alex's second post argues that the anti-research position is another Karl Rove special, like steel tariffs, designed to help Republicans capture the Senate. I'd say Democrats should make an issue of it—Bush is selling out sick people to pander to the anti-abortion lobby!—but so far they haven't. I guess they figure it's too hard to explain.

The third post argues that "the GOP is making a very large mistake in their position against therapeutic cloning, because if stem cell research fulfills its potential, it could finally bring us away from the chronic care, molecular paradigm of medicine today. In its place we would have a world of genetic screening to identify diseases that we are susceptible to later in life, and before they become a problem, we can use our own cells to introduce genetic fixes into our bodies that prevent the disease from occurring." Ah, Alex, the whole point of the Kass agenda is to block that result so people don't live too long or forget that suffering is part of the human condition. That's what makes Kass's position different from the pro-lifers', and while the latter are driving the politics, the former is framing the intellectual debate.

Mark Whittington's Curmudgeons Corner provides a link to the petition with the note, "This is, alas, one issue upon which President Bush is mistaken."

Jeff Wolfe points readers to the petition. He's also got some interesting info on airport security, or lack of same, and my old boss Bob Poole's work on the issue. [Posted 4/15.]

BOOKS UPDATE: If you ordered a signed copy of TFAIE via PayPal by last Friday, your book is on its way. If you'd like to order a copy, click the cover to the left. Please be sure to note to whom you want it signed. (PayPal provides a space for comments; use it!) I also accept mail orders. Email me for the address. Thanks for all the interest.

Here's Oliver Willis's post on blogging for book sales. It makes a lot of sense to me. [Posted 4/15.]