When President Obama signed the Executive Order last week which overturned President Bush’s policy on stem cell research, the White House extended a warm invitation to the noted Dr. Charles Krauthammer, among other distinguished guests, to attend the official signing ceremony. Dr. Krauthammer declined the invitation, and vehemently refused to attend the ceremony. In his op-ed article in The Washington Post today, entitled “Obama’s ‘Science’ Fiction”, Dr. Krauthammer explains precisely why, and in no uncertain terms.

During the 5 years that Dr. Krauthammer served on President Bush’s President’s Council on Bioethics, and despite the fact that he had been personally appointed to the council by President Bush himself, Dr. Krauthammer consistently argued, as he explains, “that, contrary to the Bush policy, federal funding should be extended to research on embryonic stem cell lines derived from discarded embryos in fertility clinics.” The words, “derived from discarded embryos in fertility clinics” constitute the key point in Dr. Krauthammer’s stance under the Bush administration, which is precisely why he refused to accept President Obama’s invitation. “I declined to attend,” Dr. Krauthammer states. “Once you show your face at these things, you become a tacit endorser of whatever they spring. My caution was vindicated.” Dr. Krauthammer has now made it perfectly clear that he certainly does not endorse President Obama’s policy on stem cells, and far from remaining tacit on the subject, Dr. Krauthammer has authored an eye-opening and blunt assessment of President Obama’s mistakes in this matter.

Dr. Krauthammer begins his Washington Post op-ed piece by reminding the reader of the context within which the new administration’s actions have taken place. “President Bush had restricted federal funding for embryonic stem cell research to cells derived from embryos that had already been destroyed (as of his speech of August 9, 2001),” Dr. Krauthammer explains. “While I favor moving that moral line to additionally permit the use of spare fertility clinic embryos,” he continues, “President Obama replaced it with no line at all. He pointedly left open the creation of cloned – and noncloned sperm-and-egg-derived – human embryos solely for the purpose of dismemberment and use for parts.”

Lest anyone misunderstand Dr. Krauthammer, he further clarifies his stance by adding, “I am not religious. I do not believe that personhood is conferred upon conception. But I also do not believe that a human embryo is the moral equivalent of a hangnail and deserves no more respect than an appendix. Moreover, given the protean power of embryonic manipulation, the temptation it presents to science and the well-recorded propensity for evil even in the pursuit of good, lines must be drawn. I suggested the bright line prohibiting the deliberate creation of human embryos solely for the instrumental purpose of research – a clear violation of the categorical imperative not to make a human life (even if only a potential human life) a means rather than an end. On this, Obama has nothing to say. He leaves it entirely to the scientists. This is more than moral abdication. It is acquiescence to the mystique of ‘science’ and its inherent moral benevolence. How anyone as sophisticated as Obama can believe this within living memory of Mengele and Tuskegee and the fake (and coercive) South Korean stem cell research is hard to fathom.”

Dr. Krauthammer echoes the sentiments of many other scientists and doctors, few of whom enjoy the distinction, as Dr. Krauthammer does, of having won a Pulitzer Prize and of having been a former U.S. Presidential Science Advisor and of having their views and opinions deemed to be so insightful and valuable that they are regularly featured in the nation’s, and indeed the world’s, leading newspapers. Nor are there many scientists and doctors who personally received invitations from the White House to attend Obama’s signing ceremony, as Dr. Krauthammer did; perhaps even fewer would have had the courage and integrity to decline such an invitation, if they had been invited. Additionally, Dr. Krauthammer does not hesitate to make the point that, even if he had somehow managed to convince himself to go to the White House for the ceremony, he would not have stayed long.

As Dr. Krauthammer continues, “That part of the ceremony, watched from the safe distance of my office, made me uneasy. The other part – the ostentatious issuance of a memorandum on ‘restoring scientific integrity to government decision-making’ – would have made me walk out. Restoring? The implication, of course, is that while Obama is guided solely by science, Bush was driven by dogma, ideology and politics. What an outrage. Bush’s nationally televised stem cell speech was the most morally serious address on medical ethics ever given by an American president. It was so scrupulous in presenting the best case for both his view AND THE CONTRARY VIEW that until the last few minutes, the listener had no idea where Bush would come out. Obama’s address was morally unserious in the extreme. It was populated, as his didactic discourses always are, with a forest of straw men. Such as his admonition that we must resist the ‘false choice between sound science and moral values.’ Yet, exactly 2 minutes and 12 seconds later he went on to declare that he would never open the door to the ‘use of cloning for human reproduction.’ Does he not think that a cloned human would be of extraordinary scientific interest? And yet he banned it. Is he so obtuse as not to see that he had just made a choice of ethics over science? Yet, unlike Bush, who painstakingly explained the balance of ethical and scientific goods he was trying to achieve, Obama did not even pretend to make the case why some practices are morally permissible and others are not.”

The outrage that Dr. Krauthammer expresses so eloquently is mild in comparison to that which many other people feel, such as, for example, the numerous distinguished scientists and doctors who work exclusively with adult stem cells, not embryonic stem cells, and to whom Obama’s new policy, not to mention his insulting and confrontational remarks, are a direct and blatant affront. Most scientists and doctors, however, even those who work only with adult stem cells, stop just short of engaging in ethical debate. Dr. Krauthammer, however, is not so timid, and fortunately for the rest of us he is unafraid to call a spade a spade. As Dr. Krauthammer puts it, in regard to Obama’s actions, “This is not just intellectual laziness. It is the moral arrogance of a man who continuously dismisses his critics as ideological while he is guided exclusively by pragmatism (in economics, social policy, foreign policy) and science in medical ethics. Science has everything to say about what is possible. Science has nothing to say about what is permissible. Obama’s pretense that he will ‘restore science to its rightful place’ and make science, not ideology, dispositive in moral debates is yet more rhetorical sleight of hand – this time to abdicate decision-making and color his own ideological preferences as authentically ‘scientific’.”

Dr. Krauthammer’s words for Obama are not to be taken lightly, nor is Dr. Krauthammer’s stance on stem cell research. Having been paralyzed in an automobile accident in 1972 during his first year in medical school, Dr. Krauthammer has been a paraplegic and confined to a wheelchair for nearly 4 decades. If anyone could benefit from stem cell therapies, it would be Dr. Krauthammer. Despite the automobile accident, however, and despite the resulting year-long hospitalization and his permanent paraplegia, Dr. Krauthammer graduated with the rest of his class from Harvard Medical School in 1975 and went on to become a leading psychiatrist at the prestigious Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. His seminal work, discoveries and publications during these years are still repeatedly cited today in the leading textbooks of the field. Although he is board certified by the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology, he chose to leave medical practice in 1978 when he was appointed Presidential Science Advisor to President Carter. Since then, his views and analyses on a variety of national and international issues have been widely respected and specifically sought by presidential administrations of both parties; indeed, his views and analyses have helped to shape the very structure of formal U.S. national and international policy over the years.

In 2006, Charles Krauthammer, M.D., was named the “most influential commentator in America” by the Financial Times, which wrote: “Krauthammer has influenced U.S. foreign policy for more than two decades. He coined and developed ‘The Reagan Doctrine’ in 1985 and he defined the U.S. role as sole superpower in his essay, ‘The Unipolar Moment’, published shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Krauthammer’s 2004 speech ‘Democratic Realism’ set out a framework for tackling the post 9/11 world, focusing on the promotion of democracy in the Middle East.”

In 1987 Dr. Krauthammer was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for his “distinguished commentary” and highly influential work at The Washington Post. To this day, his weekly column still appears in The Washington Post and is syndicated in more than 200 newspapers and media outlets around the world.

Even as a member of the President’s Council on Bioethics under President George W. Bush, Dr. Krauthammer did not hesitate to oppose President Bush’s stance on stem cell policy, even though he respected President Bush’s attempts to balance opposing views of the argument. Now, however, through Obama’s pretentious and grossly ill-advised statements on this gravely serious matter, the new president has not only disappointed but directly offended many people who had higher hopes for him, especially within the scientific and medical communities.

Dr. Krauthammer concludes his Washington Post op-ed article by quoting none other than Dr. James Thomson, the mild-mannered developmental biologist who suddenly skyrocketed to international fame when he became the first person to isolate a human embryonic stem cell in the laboratory in 1998, and who is now revered throughout the world as the “father” of embryonic stem cell science. As Dr. Krauthammer writes, “Dr. James Thomson, the pioneer of embryonic stem cells, said ‘if human embryonic stem cell research does not make you at least a little bit uncomfortable, you have not thought about it enough.’ Obama clearly has not.”

As someone whose keen insights have been so indispensable to so many U.S. presidents for so many years, on so many of the most pressing domestic and foreign policy issues of the day, Dr. Krauthammer has long been seen and valued by both political parties as someone whose expertise, and whose extraordinary breadth and depth of understanding on a wide range of issues, are invaluable. Today, especially on the topic of stem cells, Dr. Krauthammer’s analyses are particularly relevant not just because they come from someone who has been a prominent political advisor to U.S. presidents for nearly 40 years, but also because of Dr. Krauthammer’s accomplishments as a physician, as a medical researcher at one of the leading research hospitals in the world, and as a paraplegic. The current, new U.S. president, however, would seem to be the first U.S. president, ever, since prior to the Carter administration in the 1970s, who has chosen to ignore entirely what Dr. Krauthammer has to say.

A mere two days after supposedly reversing President Bush’s restrictions on the federal funding of human embryonic stem cell research, President Obama today signed into law a ban on the use of federal funding for human embryonic stem cell research. Contrary to popular misunderstanding, therefore, legislative restrictions have not been reversed.

Without any publicity or fanfare whatsoever, and in a move that counteracts and contradicts his highly publicized action a mere two days earlier, President Obama today signed a law that bans the federal funding of any procedure that involves either the creation or the destruction of a human embryo for research purposes. Since the process by which embryonic stem cells are extracted from an embryo results in the immediate destruction of that embryo, such a law makes the federal funding of embryonic stem cell research on human embryos, and the derivation of new human embryonic stem cell lines from those embryos, illegal.

The specific piece of legislation under consideration is the Dickey-Wicker Amendment, which was first signed into law in 1995 under the Clinton Administration. It is this Amendment which remains the primary legislative “obstacle” to embryonic stem cell research – not the comparatively trivial funding restraints which Obama overturned two days earlier and which were mistakenly interpreted by many to represent a grand, sweeping change in national policy; in actuality, the only policy that Obama was able to change two days ago was an increase in the applicability of federal funds to a few hundred human embryonic stem cell lines, instead of to the approximately 21 human embryonic stem cell lines that were already created prior to President Bush’s Executive Order on August 9th of 2001.

The Dickey-Wicker Amendment was included today in the 465-page Omnibus spending bill that will fund government agencies through September 30th of this year, which is the end of the fourth quarter of the 2009 fiscal year (FY09). As the Amendment specifically states, “None of the funds made available in this Act may be used for: 1/ the creation of a human embryo or embryos for research purposes, or 2/ research in which a human embryo or embryos are destroyed, discarded or knowingly subjected to risk of injury or death.” Since the extraction of embryonic stem cells from an embryo results in the immediate destruction of that embryo, as already explained, such language pertains directly to the creation of new human embryonic stem cell lines.

It is the creation of new human embryonic stem cell lines, however, that embryonic stem cell scientists covet the most, not the authorization to spend federally awarded grant money on already existing human embryonic stem cell lines. In regard to the creation of new human embryonic stem cell lines, President Obama has changed nothing, nor does he have the power to change this law by himself since only Congress, not the president, can overturn such an Amendment. Not surprisingly, some members of Congress are actively mobilizing their efforts to do exactly that. Nevertheless, the Dickey-Wicker Amendment only applies to the use of federal money, not to the use of private (non-taxpayer) money, so it is still perfectly legal, as it has always been, to create and destroy as many human embryos as one wants, as long as it is done with private (non-taxpayer-derived) funding.

Named after its authors, Representatives Jay Dickey of Arkansas and Roger Wicker of Mississippi, the Dickey-Wicker Amendment was originally passed in 1995 under the Clinton Administration as a rider attached to the appropriations bill for the Department of Health and Human Services, and Congress has actively voted to renew the Amendment every year since then, although that could change by the end of this year. To reiterate, it was President Bill Clinton who signed this Amendment into law, not President George W. Bush, who merely inherited it.

At least until September 30th of this year, therefore, it will still be illegal to spend federal funding (i.e., NIH grant money, which comes directly from the U.S. taxpayer) on any human embryonic stem cell research that involves newly created human embryonic stem cell lines, since, by necessity, the creation of such stem cell lines requires the destruction of the human embryos from which the cells are derived.

Democratic Representative Diana DeGette of Colorado and Republican Representative Mike Castle of Delaware, who twice failed to overturn Bush’s funding restrictions, are now trying to pass legislation to repeal the Dickey-Wicker Amendment. Similarly, an editorial in The New York Times on Tuesday called for Congress to repeal the Dickey-Wicker Amendment, but opposition still remains strong.

According to Douglas Johnson, spokeman for the National Right to Life Committee, “This sets the stage for an attack on the Dickey-Wicker law. Any member of Congress who votes for legislation to repeal this law is voting to allow federal funding of human embryo farms, created through the use of human cloning.” In his highly publicized and widely applauded though generally misunderstood speech on Monday, Obama assured people who have ethical concerns about embryonic stem cell research that his policy is designed so that it “never opens the door to the use of cloning for human reproduction”, which he described as “dangerous, profoundly wrong, and has no place in our society or any society.” However, the overturning of the Dickey-Wicker Amendment would be seen by many as a slippery slope that would inevitably lead not only to cloning but also to a number of other consequences that would be “dangerous” and “profoundly wrong”, to use Obama’s own words.

Nevertheless, only Congress, not the president, can overturn the Dickey-Wicker Amendment, which still remains in effect as the law, at least until September 30th of this year. Contrary to popular misconception, therefore, President Obama has not entirely reversed the legislative policies that he seems to be credited with reversing, and which he inherited from his predecessor – who, in turn, inherited the Dickey-Wicker Amendment from his predecessor, President Bill Clinton.

One can only marvel at how and why Obama happened to legalize the federal funding of human embryonic stem cell research on Monday, while surrounded by carefully orchestrated applause and fanfare, and then immediately perform an about-face a mere 2 days later and ban human embryonic stem cell research on Wednesday, without any reporters or television cameras present and with no fanfare whatsoever.

(Please see the related news article on this website, entitled, “Obama Decrees Changes in Embryonic Stem Cell Research, Though Not What One Might Expect”, dated March 9, 2009).

The Executive Order which Obama signed yesterday formally and specifically rescinded Executive Order 13435, which President Bush signed into law on June 20th of 2007, and which was an initiative pushing the Secretary of Health and Human Services to “conduct and support research” on stem cells that “may result in improved understanding for treatments for diseases and other adverse health conditions, but are derived without creating a human embryo for research purposes or destroying, discarding, or subjecting to harm a human embryo or fetus” – such as, for example, therapies developed from research conducted on adult stem cells and on iPS (induced pluripotent stem) cells. Consequently, in response to President Bush’s 2007 Executive Order, the NIH (the National Institutes of Health) drew up a plan at that time for implementing President Bush’s order, in which the NIH authors stated that, “Adult stem cells, such as blood-forming stem cells in bone marrow … are currently the only type of stem cell commonly used to treat human diseases.” Indeed, the only type of stem cell research that has ever yielded an actual treatment for anything is adult stem cell research, which is already being used in clinics around the world for a wide variety of diseases and injuries. By sharp contrast, embryonic stem cells have never resulted in any therapies for anything.

President Obama is not without his critics, especially in his decision to rescind this particular Executive Order of President Bush, which did not prohibit anything but instead specifically encouraged further research with adult stem cells and other non-embryonic sources of adult stem cells, such as iPS cells. One such critic of Obama, the bioethicist Wesley Smith, points out that Obama is putting politics and ideology above science – the very thing that Obama accuses his predecessor of doing. According to Wesley Smith, “I can think of only two reasons for this action, for which I saw no advocacy either in the election or during the first weeks of the Administration: first, vindictiveness against all things ‘Bush’ or policies considered by the Left to be ‘pro-life’; and second, a desire to get the public to see unborn human life as a mere corn crop ripe for the harvest. So much for taking the politics out of science!”

The precise reasons why Mr. Obama decided to overturn an Executive Order that sought to attain stem cell therapies from non-embryonic sources such as adult stem cells and iPS cells, is anyone’s guess. One would think that “a man of faith”, as President Obama describes himself, would be in favor of such research and development purely on ethical grounds, if not also on scientific grounds, which are considerably more compelling for adult stem cells than for embryonic stem cells. To the contrary, however, yesterday’s actions by Obama demonstrate not only that he is strongly pro-embryonic stem cell research, at all costs, but also that he is strongly anti-adult stem cell research.

According to House Minority Leader John Boehner of Ohio, “Advancements in science and research have moved faster than the debates among politicians in Washington, D.C., and breakthroughs announced in recent years confirm that the full potential of stem cell research can be realized without the destruction of human embryos.”

As Republican Senator Richard Shelby of Alabama also adds, “My basic tenet here is I don’t think we should create life to enhance life and to do research and so forth. I know that people argue there are other ways. I think we should continue our biomedical research everywhere we can, but we should have some ethics about it.”

(Please see the related article on this website, entitled, “Obama Decrees Changes in Embryonic Stem Cell Research, Though Not What One Might Expect”, dated March 9, 2009).