My cousin got tickets for a lecture by Stephen Hawking at Oakland’s Paramount Theatre last Thursday night. The venue is gorgeous, by the way, and anyone visiting the Bay Area should try to attend at least one performance here. The 3000 seats were just about sold out. The lecture began with a gushy woman from a local science museum thanking the sponsors. This struck me as odd because, at almost $100 per ticket, the audience had paid more than $200,000 to attend. Even in an era of cosmic inflation, I couldn’t figure out how $200k wouldn’t cover expenses. Hawking was wheeled out on stage after this intro. He controls the sequence of text strings being fed into a speech synthesizer via eye blinks. Unlike at most computer nerd conferences, there was no TV camera pointed at Hawking and no projection of his face, so folks sitting more than a few rows back couldn’t really see what he was doing. Hawking’s lecture was a 45-minute explanation of Cosmology with PowerPoint slides and was very sketchy. If you had not read a book such as Simon Singh’s brilliant and clear Big Bang
The question and answer period at the end was a little more interesting. Hawking selected from previous interview questions for which he had already laboriously prepared answers. His favorite show on American television is the Simpsons. He hates George W. Bush for (1) wanting to send humans to Mars, and (2) wanting to limit Federal funding for research on new stem cell lines. I thought that this hatred for W. was odd. There are a lot of wasteful things that the government does, and few of them are as much fun as a mission to Mars (I hope that they send old adventurous private citizens rather than government employees whose death will plunge us all into mourning). The anger over the stem cell funding debacle made even less sense, being so far outside of Hawking’s research area (you could argue that it is within his personal area, given that he suffers from ALS, but (a) Hawking is very old and basic research is unlikely to prove helpful within his lifetime, and (b) scientists pride themselves on being dispassionate).
Let’s review the reality of stem cell research funding in the U.S. The Federales won’t fund research on new stem cell lines, only on old ones. This leaves folks who want to work on new lines with the following options: (1) a $3 billion fund established by the State of Caliornia for stem cell research; (2) the $billions in private biomedical research funding from foundations such as Howard Hughes Medical Institute; (3) the $billions in private biomedical research and development funding from drug companies such as Merck. If working on stem cells is an automatic path to results and glory for researchers and funders, it would seem that quite a bit of money is available. Why then get so angry with W. for having an opinion?
One possible explanation: Solidarity with other scientists against laypeople. The idea that a layperson could have an opinion and interfere with scientific funding decisions is anathema to a fraternity of scientists. Today the boneheads, lacking even a basic Ph.D., are questioning the need for research on new stem cell lines. Maybe tomorrow they will start questioning whether it is wise to spend $100 billion on a new accelerator to study inflaton particles.
Its not so much laypeople as politicians who are the problem in this case. Laypeople, after all, voted for the Proposition that gave the green light to CA’s stem cell initiative. As for the Federal funding, its more complex than that. Even if you find private funding through, say, HHMI you have to essentially isolate your lab leading to massive duplication of equipment and expertise. I don’t know for sure, but I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that you didn’t get to use postdocs with federally funded Fellowships (or students depending on how the funding is structured) either. You basically have a clean room situation and that gets really expensive really quickly. The big pharma companies can probably still do it, but I wouldn’t blame them if they conducted the research overseas in someplace like Singapore if the CA money spends a lot of time locked up in court.
The anti-stem cell thing is worse than cheap lay people who don’t want to pay for it. Here in Kansas City, we have a multi-billion dollar biological research institute (The Stowers Institute) that just sent $6 million out of the state to researchers in Boston because the whackos are out to criminalize what they do – they are willing to hurt the economic interests of their own region over it ($6 million isn’t that big of a deal, but losing the institute would be, and I don’t think that’s out of the question). This is not tax money out of your pocket – this is free money from a super-rich guy who wants to spend it in this city, and they’re chasing it away.
These are essentially the same kind of people who used to burn people at the stake for saying the Earth was round. Scientists sense this and are repelled by it, even if it doesn’t directly affect their field. But who’s to say it doesn’t, in this case? Anti-stem cell people are mostly the same people who are pushing intelligent design, and if they had the chance, they’d go after physicists who make the blasphemous claim that the world is more than 6000 years old.
I think the real issue with non-funding of stem cell research by the federal government is that it has a chilling effect on all potential funding (by sources public, such as the states, and private, fundations and such).
Since stem cell research is at this point more of a speculative research topic that requires vast sums of money without any clear social or business upside, my opinion is that Stephen Hawking might have taken offence to the barrier to general advancement rather than his own personal potential for benefit.
I think it’s perfectly reasonable that he could take Bush’s anti-stem cell stance as a personal affront, given it’s one of the few ways he could actually be fixed.
A Primer on Stem Cells, from the ALS association.
As far as the personal angle goes… let’s ignore the fact that physicists try not to argue from purely personal benefit, and the fact that Hawking is 62 years old and very unlikely to live long enough for pure research to translate into practical therapy. We still have an English citizen complaining that the U.S. government and the U.S. taxpayers aren’t doing enough for his personal interest. That seems odd. When an American gets sick, you don’t see him going over to China or England or Germany demanding that the governments of those countries change their policies. The U.S. government is not, after all, discouraging other countries from pursuing whatever scientific research programs they desire (with the exception of some weapons research).
However from a global viewpoint, if the US does not participate in stem cell research a large portion of the world’s resources are not being utilized to help in the discovery of cures. The reason that these resouces are not being used is due to the irrational views of a subset of the American population. These potential cures could benefit both US citizens and the rest of the world with a small marginal cost to produce treatments once they are discovered.
The more valid comparison would be if a group of people could produce treatments which could benefit both their members and those of other groups but refuses to because of some reason incompatable with their religious viewpoint. It is not that they are hindering the efforts of the other groups however they are hindering the efforts of mankind on the whole.
Keith: If we believe that the U.S. somehow has an obligation to pursue medical research for the benefit of non-U.S. citizens, it would make a lot more sense to spend tax dollars on potential cures for and prevention of malaria and similar diseases that afflict tens of millions of people worldwide. Stem cell research, pro or con, does not seem like a major public health issue.
Unmentioned in this, if I understand the issue at hand, is that the funding is/was cut on embryonic stem cells, not on adult stem cells (readily available via e.g. umbilical cord blood).
Not sure if the info I have, which points out that all real advances have so far come from the non-contrversial adult stem cells, is accurate.
Perhaps it is not a “personal interest” the way that you frame it. Perhaps he has a desire to try to lessen the suffering of any future generations. And the U.S. has the economy to affect such changes. I think his position is very understandable. Christopher Reeve probably knew he would never be cured himself, but he wanted to speak on behalf of all those less influential than him. People do that, you know.
Woody: Again, if you had a purely altruistic desire to lessen the sufferings of future generations, you would focus on Africans and their miseries (cf. Bill Gates). As for the U.S. economy being so huge that we have an obligation to do everything for everyone, I don’t buy it. We don’t have a monopoly on smart people and money. The European Union has roughly the same level of resources as the U.S. and can do nothing but ste m cell research if it wants to. If Hawking cared that much, he could transition from physics to biology himself, as many other physicists have done over the past three decades. Most have found, however, that biology is too hard a nut to be cracked.
[Note: It is the “we’re big and therefore responsible for everyone” argument that has us spend lives and $billions trying to turn Iraq into some sort of democratic multi-cultural paradise, along the lines of California. I don’t buy into the theory that the U.S. has limitless capabilities or that citizens of other countries should be able to tap into our government’s assets on an equal basis with U.S. citizens.]