Opinion : Stem Cells

There has been a lot of debate recently about the morals of Stem cell research. Unfortunately, most of this debate is taking place between individuals who have no clue and are blinded by politics. I am always for research, but both sides make some good points. Personally, I believe the best solution would be to create as many unique lines as there are differentiated adult cells and then simply clone those for research. Also I agree that privately funded scientists should be allowed to do whatever they choose as long as their research has some scientific end. Some limits are reasonable though, and doing things because they can be done will quickly lead to trouble.
But back to the debate itself. What should be a scientific-ethical debate has been twisted by politicians to be an excuse to rile people up and make ad hominem arguments. A particularly worrisome example is this column by one of my otherwise favorite columnists, William Saletan. In contrast to his usually well reasoned articles on biotechnology, this column is just using stem cells as an opportunity to attack President Bush. While Saletan makes a worthwhile comparison between Bush's positions, he completely misses Bush's point. Sure you are killing one person for the good of others in both cases, but look at who is dying. In the Capital punishment case(or in the war on terrorism I suppose), it is a convicted killer, that is, someone who has been proved beyond reasonable doubt to have no respect for human life. In the stem cell case, the sacrifice is an innocent life, a baby if you will. Sure technically in both cases you are ending a life that at that point is useless to society, but there is a greater moral issue here, and I think most people can see why Bush might choose to kill the murderer and not a child.
For an example more relevant to this issue, lets say that in the future you are dying of kidney failure and need a transplant. Now you are given two options: either they can clone you, bring your clone to term, then abort him and harvest the new organs, or we can forcibly take them from someone spending life in prison for murder. Which would you choose? (Assuming that you won't reject both and die for your moral beliefs.) This is the real debate. I won't deny(and I assume Bush would agree) that the science is amazing and can save your life, its just that there is often a better alternative.
Nevertheless, this would only be a real problem if we actually could clone people and grow replacement organs. Yet that technology, and all the other benefits that stem cell research advocates point to does not exist yet. So we should spend lots of money on research and move them along right? Well California and a few others have started to act on this by making huge grants available, but is this worthwhile? I am a big fan of increasing funding for biomedical research (especially the research that I do) but we need to rethink our priorities. The fact is, infectious disease, along with cancer and heart disease are of much greater concern, and stem cell technology does not address any of these problems. Lets say that the state of California devotes a billion dollars of its research fund to regenerative stem cell technology and discovers how to regrow nerve cells. (a very likely scenario by the way) You can see the press coverage now...crippled people getting out of wheelchairs and walking, victims from horrible accidents making a full recovery. Sure this will be wonderful (and certainly overblown by the media) but this will only help maybe a few thousand people. And these people would mostly be middle to upperclass individuals, whose injuries are often at least partially their own fault. Now let's say that California had instead spent that Billion dollars on good-old-fashioned disease research and instead found a vaccine for malaria, or maybe AIDS. Estimates vary, but experts say that nearly 50 million people have AIDS and many more than that have TB and Malaria. This would clearly do the world a much greater good.
As bad as Parkinsons disease or chronic diabetes might seem, we are in far more danger from infectious disease and we should spend our research dollars accordingly. Unfortunately, Stem cell research is in vogue, and thanks to its politicized status, will certainly get disproportional funding.

(And again I find myself supporting Bush, who is proposing a sound policy for the wrong reasons. )