Dystopian sci-fi shapes White House stem-cell policy

December 27, 2007

One of the more annoying qualities of the Bush White House’s policy on stem-cell research the last several years is its incoherence. It’s not just that the president has blocked potentially life-saving medical research, it’s that his rationale for doing so ends up contradicting itself.

As Bush sees it, embryos are human life, and should therefore not be subjected to medical testing. The White House, at one point last year, went so far as to argue that it’s literally “murder” to conduct research on these embryos.

At the same time, however, the same White House brags about the president’s support for privately-funded stem-cell research, and touts Bush’s support for IVF clinics, where “people” are stored and destroyed all the time. There’s just no consistency to the ideological approach, but that didn’t stop the president from vetoing a popular stem-cell research bill, twice.

I’ve long wondered how Bush came to embrace such a bizarre position, and assumed he was just winging it, making up a rationale as he went along. As it turns out, that’s not the case — the president was influenced by a dystopian sci-fi novel. Actually, he was influenced by portions of a dystopian sci-fi novel.

In the new issue of Commentary magazine, former Bush advisor Jay Lefkowitz explained how he helped convince the president to oppose public funding of additional stem-cell lines: he used “Brave New World.” (via ThinkProgress)

A few days later, I brought into the Oval Office my copy of Brave New World, Aldous Huxley’s 1932 anti-utopian novel, and as I read passages aloud imagining a future in which humans would be bred in hatcheries, a chill came over the room.

“We’re tinkering with the boundaries of life here,” Bush said when I finished. “We’re on the edge of a cliff. And if we take a step off the cliff, there’s no going back. Perhaps we should only take one step at a time.”

Wow, that’s really dumb.

To be fair, Lefkowitz’s article doesn’t suggest that reading from Huxley was the only thing that convinced the president to take a bizarre position on the issue, but based on his piece, reading “passages” from the Huxley novel seems to have had an effect.

It suggests the White House, for all its rhetoric, was taking the policy debate about as seriously as it takes any substantive discussion — which is to say, not at all. Taking a step “off the cliff”? We’re talking about a controversy in which medical researchers would use embryos from IVF clinics that would otherwise be discarded. This bears no resemblance to “a future in which humans would be bred in hatcheries,” unless someone is just looking for an excuse to block the research in the first place.

Amanda added:

It’s unclear what passage Lefkowitz read, but Brave New World opens with a scene at the Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Centre, where embryos are turned into full human beings — often dozens of pairs of “identical twins” to ensure “social stability.”

Scientists are not proposing such fictional experiments and recognize the need to balance ethics with scientific progress. In fact, the legislation expanding embryonic stem cell research (vetoed by Bush) — actually proposed ethics regulations that were stricter than Bush’s.

I’m looking forward to a point in which we’ll have a president who won’t base scientific policy on novel excerpts read to him in the Oval Office, aren’t you?

Remember this was all before 9-11.

I remember hearing people say that this was Bush’s big chance to show that he was a deep thinker.

Bush thought that he had found the great compromise.

He wouldn’t allow any more ‘people’ to be killed but he wouldn’t stop the research on the results of the ‘people’ who already, past tense, had been killed.

Of course, there appears no evidence that Bush even thought about IVF.

But the thing I remember most was that the White House was trying to use this decision to SHOW that Bush was smart enough to be President

  • If the Republican Congressional delegation can use a Michael Crichton novel as “evidence” for their anti-intellectual position on climate change, ol C-student himself can use Huxley as authority on modern stem cell research.

    Maybe it would be better if the Republicans simply didn’t read at all.

  • Killing fertilized eggs for scientific purposes is murder. Killing fertilized eggs to reduce storage expenses is good business.

  • Bush is a moron, and morons get their opinion reinforcement in a host of dumb places, primarily in a retarded book written in the dark ages. Stupid presidents’ reading habits are not the base problem. I’m looking forward to some Democratic leadership who read the constitution.

  • It’s not Bush’s moral ideology that his position on stem cell research and things like healthcare are based on. It’s his ECONOMIC ideology. If you read btween the lines of his statements, it’s clear he has no problem with stem cell research that is done in the name of PROFIT, just as he is all for universal health care, as long as it’s a privately owned systm, with profit as it’s primary goal. In this light, Bush’s argument makes perfect sense. It’s just that he can’t be truthful about anything, and therefore can’t just come out and say it.

  • So his science policy is guided by a bad science fiction novel written before he was even born? Why am I not surprised? I guess Olaf Stapledon is beyond his being-read-to level.

  • Given this, the idea that Cheney fancies himself a modern-day Woundwort from Watership Down could become plausible. No one ever told him, though, that the big bad bunny gets killed by a big ugly mutt-of-a-dog in the end. May this mutt of a Republic be so fortunate!

  • Bush appears to be the most intellectually lazy individual currently in the public eye.
    As he floats through life he grabs whatever is floating around him to justify his “position”.
    Kinda suggests some appropriate imagery eh?

  • Gee, what other great ideas will Bush get from future readings?

    “Today Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, at the behest of President Bush, announced the awarding of a multi-billion dollar contract to Lockheed Martin to develop a network of space-based weapons that will help defend our planet against a potential attack by the Vogon Constructor Fleet.”

  • Why on Earth was someone in the Oval Office reading an old scifi book to the President of the United States in the first place? This could explain why he doesn’t have the time to read NIEs. Maybe when the one about OBL determined to strike inside the US came along, he was busy having someone read Stanger in a Strange Land to him. Then again, it may have been The Cat in the Hat.

  • This might also explain why Bush opposes illegal Replicants.

    “We’re on the edge of a cliff. And if we take a step off the cliff, there’s no going back. Perhaps we should only take one step at a time.”

    Because when you’re standing at the edge of a cliff, it’s wise to continue wakling one step at a time.

  • Come on, give the guy some credit for at least looking at more challenging reading material. Sure he’s wrong on policy, but it is sure an improvement if Bush has moved on from The Pet Goat to Brave new World.

  • I think this is all a bunch of hype. Most people haven’t read Brave New World, but a lot of people have heard of it. Less people than have heard of it actually know what it’s about. People put these famous novelists up on a pedestal they maybe often don’t deserve, because the novelists often can’t communicate an idea clearly (that is, without partisan ideologues twisting their words to be something they didn’t mean). The authors attempt to translate more than coin ideas, by putting the ideas of bigger thinkers into a story to dramatize those ideas. But when a person hears Bush and his staff are contemplating something like Brave New World, they’ll think Bush is smart and up to something smart. Unfortunately, Bush and his helpers aren’t really the types to give literary lights an honest reading (the kind that doesn’t have a preconceived goal) or to consult honest scientists/intellectuals/philosophers.

  • One wonders what Bush would conclude from having ‘1984’ read to him? That war is peace, that freedom is slavery? That Big Brother is good? Certainly the tortured language and propaganda of his regime seems to have been taken, if not from ‘1984’ then from Goeble’s handbook for running the Third Reich. Fortunately no one has read him Mary Shelley’s ‘Frankenstein’ or he would be making speeches about forbidden knowledge, and taboo subjects. Clearly he would prefer us to curse the darkness rather than embrace the sun.

    Once upon a time, certainly in Bush’s youth, both ‘Brave New World’ and ‘1984’ were required reading in high school, or in college. He probably read neither since keggers, dancing nude, and snorting white powder are more important.

  • Alan Bullock’s chilling biography “Hitler: A Study in Tyranny” makes the point that Adolf routinely scoured books looking for excerpts, anti-Semitic quotes he could use in his rhetorical extravaganzas. He had no interest in reading books, just mining them for oratorical gems.

    Yet another parallel between Then and Now.

  • Last night Chris Matthews made what I thought was one of the most astonishingly stupid statements I’d heard about Bush from supposedly sane and intelligent people. He noted Bush is “unpopular” among Democrats (when in actuality Bush is despised around the globe), and that’s “primarily because of the war in Iraq.” So, Bush is only unpopular with Dems, according to Matthews, and only because those peacenik lefty extremists don’t like the war. “Oh how wrong you are,” I said to his image, shaking my head. What is it about Bush that people can ‘t get it? The man is so monumentally unqualified for office that you want to scream, but the establishment just won’t, or can’t, get it.

    A post like this ought to send shivers up the spine of every American. This man is just so pathetic, stupid, ignorant and uneducated. And every single day we are confronted with examples of his incompetence and mendacity, and nobody blinks.

  • I think Neil (#1) has a good point. Boy George II’s Stem Cell Research funding decision was supposed to be his “thinking real hard on an issue” moment. Of course, as a cocaine/alcohol brain-fried dry-drunk all thinking is hard for BGII. He lacks introspection because it literally hurts his brain to try and rethink an issue.

    I think PNACcio (#5) has a good point. BGII’s policy, if the cell lines has retained any viability, would have meant on company that invented the process of culturing stem cells on a layer of mouse cells would have had license rights to every treatment invented from those stem cells. There’s an opportunity for a profitable monopoly. Of course it turns out that BGII’s stem cell lines just started dying out, leaving researchers nothing to work with and thus increasing the demands for alternatives.

    Of course, do you really want a therapy that could introduce mice-related viruses into the human population?

    But honestly, the promise of stem cell research is that the researchers can create processes to produce cells, tissues or even organs from your own genetic material, reducing the danger of rejection and eliminating the wait for someone to die and give you an organ. The danger, which is never talked about (read Lois Bujold’s Miles Naismith Vorkensen series) is that people will, rather than clone up just an organ, will clone a whole person, chop out the brain and put their own in it.

    After all, if you clone a new body from your own finger, can it be said to be a different person? Does it have a soul? Don’t you own it? Can’t you do with it what you want?

    Watch the Churches very closely. If they start to say that souls only adhere to conceived new humans, and not clones, you will know they have been bought off by the super-evil super-rich seeking life-extension.

  • Wow, that’s really dumb.

    Someone is surprised that the bipeds lacking frontal lobes and opposable thumbs – homo sap – are acting like the Republicans they are?

  • Amazing that no one notes that AWOL McFlightSuit was “read to” rather than reading the book himself.
    Another low expectation incident, I guess.
    Maybe he heard some other passages about social expectations before massaging German Chancellor Merkel?
    I could use a break from this, where’s my Soma?

  • If he’d been read “1984”, I think he would’ve come away wondering which company should be awarded the “Memory Hole” development contract.

    However, what jumps out at me is this: Steve gets it right, it’s a “dystopian” novel. “Anti-utopian” isn’t the same thing. Also, what’s the Cuban Missile Crisis again?

    Who is hiring these people?

    Oh, wait…

  • And please don’t forget that if the Mittster becomes President, his “favorite” novel is L.Ron Hubbard’s book. I’ve never read that, but I imagine we can get some really interesting science on social laws or regulations from it, hell they derived an entire religion from it. Uggghhhh.

    And I have no doubt Bush and Rove and Cheney read 1984 and unlike most sentient beings, instead of seeing it as a warning manual they saw it as a How to Book.

    I think it’d be a fascinating discussion sometime, SB, if we considered what books they might have read and memorized in how to govern.

    I’m with 2Manchu, when am I getting my towel and my Guidebook?

  • I firmly believe no one ever taught this man how to think beyond the basic stuff we all do. “I think I’m hungry – better eat something.” “I think I’m tired – better take a nap.” “Ooh, Condi’s here – I think it’s playtime!”

    He doesn’t analyze anything – he gets told what to say, and somehow he ends up believing that he’s thought an issue through. This is so evident when he tries to talk off-the-cuff – he delivers chunks and sound-bites and talking points, but you never hear him start at Point A and take people through an analysis of a situation.

    He’s not alone – there are a lot of people who can’t think. They allow the media to tall them what they should be thinking, they don’t read anything that challenges their minds, they don’t hang out with people who give two hoots about the issues, so there’s no one to talk about them with, and most of them have jobs where they’re told whether to sit, shit or turn to page 4, and when to do it.

    It’s awful, and I think partially the reason so many are susceptible to the snake oil being sold by whoever is the media darling of the moment.

    I want someone in the WH who can think and reason and analyze and absorb huge quantities of information, who finds debate and discussion a critical element in a decision-making process and who won’t be quoting Bible scripture at me as the reason why he is doing a particular thing.

  • By “reading Brave New World by Aldous Huxley,” what Bush really meant was “watching Demolition Man starring Sly Stallone.”

  • The danger, which is never talked about (read Lois Bujold’s Miles Naismith Vorkensen series) is that people will, rather than clone up just an organ, will clone a whole person, chop out the brain and put their own in it.

    Now there’s one of the dumbest things I’ve heard in a long time.

  • Well that does not surprise me, When bush first became president, his speeches were very shaky and idiotic, Its like he was reading someone elses speech, nothing has really changed he just got better at reading someone elses speech, and it is just like bush to take a position on something like stem cell research, and use a sc-fi novel to base his decision on because bush is only a figurehead all his advisers and generals are making all the decisions for the country, not that that is any different from any other president that has resided in the white house. And the way bush won the election is shady any way. It seems a little strange that florida had a problem with the count and bushes relative is the govener of that state. I love my country and the people in it but I dont love how the country is being run right now.

  • I just finished reading Brave New World. It’s a scary proposition, however I think that anything when pulled out of it’s natural context is wrong. Much like John the Savage, the text that was read to the president can be dangerous when it’s used to sway the public or the president.

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